Primate Quotes

The chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.

Orangutan babies are like human babies: helpless.

Man is a wingless animal with two feet and flat nails.

Compared to the bugs and the spiders and flies, I am an apeman.

Who are we? That is the big question. And essentially we are just an upright-walking, big-brained, super-intelligent ape.

Baboons take a bit of getting to know but, apparently, once you break the ice, so to speak, they are complex and interesting creatures with elaborate societies.

Charles Darwin and I and you broke off from the family tree from chimpanzees about five million years ago. They're still our closest genetic kin. We share 98.8 percent of the genes. We share more genes with them than zebras do with horses. And we're also their closest cousin. They have more genetic relation to us than to gorillas.

As I started to research gorillas, I began to understand that they're all totally individual and idiosyncratic, and they have their own personalities.

Darwin was Wrong! Man's still an ape.

PRIMATE, n. The head of a church, especially a State church supported by involuntary contributions. The Primate of England is the Archbishop of Canterbury, an amiable old gentleman, who occupies Lambeth Palace when living and Westminster Abbey when dead. He is commonly dead.

That penetrating gaze, that intelligence; it's hard not to be anthropomorphic when you're looking at a great ape - at any primate - but especially with gorillas. They're just so magnificent.

Bonobos are not monkeys! Bonobos are apes.

When on my return to England I showed the cast of the cranium to Professor Huxley, he remarked at once that it was the most ape-like skull he had ever beheld.

There are five kinds of great apes: bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, and the one which people always think of last: Humans!

I got a pet monkey called Charlie Chan.

A mind is a terrible thing. All this evolution nonsense is making me feel like a complete APE!

Gorillas are the largest of the great apes. A mature male may be six feet tall and weigh 400 pounds or more; his enormous arms can span eight feet.

Monkey: An arboreal animal which makes itself at home in genealogical trees

As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological times via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?

We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don't look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time.

Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams .

I learned the way a monkey learns - by watching its parents.

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

Contrary to general belief, humans imitate apes more than the reverse. The sight of monkeys or apes induces an irresistible urge in people to jump up and down, exaggeratedly scratch themselves and holler in a way that must make the primates wonder how this otherwise so intelligent species has come to depend on such inferior means of communication.

I cannot help thinking of a monkey just put into breeches [pants]