Quotes about Simian

W. N. P. Barbellion

How I hate the man who talks about the 'brute creation', with an ugly emphasis on Brute. Only Christians are capable of it. 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 time via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?

At the time, there were many people who were outraged and offended by the Evolutionary concept that man descended from “brute” animals. Cummings was one of the people who went public against those conservative elements of society who had so much difficulty with the Theory of Evolution.

Ben Jonson

Apes are apes, though clothed in scarlet.

Ambrose Bierce

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

Andrew Garfield

I was a monkey child. I was like a clown.

Haruki Murakami

I’m just kinda tired. Like a monkey in the rain.

Andy Serkis

Just being an ape is a workout.

Edwin Percy Whipple

Do the adherents of this mad theory [Evolution] realize the disgrace they are bringing on the most respectable families! There is not an aristocracy in Europe or America that can stand it one moment. For aristocracy is based on the greatness of forefathers…. With a monkey in the background, how can even a Hapsburg or a Guelf put on airs of superiority? How must he hide his face in shame to think, that, as his line lengthens into an obscure antiquity, the foreheads of his house slope, and their jaws project; that he has literally been all his life aping aristocracy, instead of being the real thing; and that, when he has reached his true beginning, his only consolation must be found in the fact that his great skulking, hulking, gibbering baboon of an ancestor rejoices, like himself, in the possession of "the third lobe," "the posterior cornu of the lateral ventricle," and "the hippocampus minor.

Here we have a very mockery of the concept of aristocracy and “good family”. This humorous essay was written less than a decade after Darwin published his first treatise on evolution. Here a witty American essayist and critic is giving an insight into the thoughts of the many people who either were scandalized by the concept of human evolution or honestly could not grasp such a new intellectual set of concepts. Many of the great scientific intellectual breakthroughs spread with stunning rapidly—usually amongst scientists, but in the case of evolution to most intellectuals and men of letters, they could use Darwin’s framework and observe evidence of evolution all over. So here, less than 10 years from the inception of evolutionary theory among English scientist, we have American non-scientific literati reading articles in the general (albeit sophisticated) Atlantic Monthly with a semi-serious, semi-comical, analysis of the thinking of people who resisted what had become in just a few years obvious truth to America’s leading intellectuals (except for most of the leading intellectual theologians who would take longer to accept evolution, but, with the exception of the extreme fundamentalists, most did.

William H. Parker

… monkeys …

Colleen Atwood

Each simian had a much different body suit, so besides trying to define class across species, there was a definite attempt to dress each group in different styles.

Simian Quotes