Frans de Waal

The fact that the apes exist and that we can study them is extremely important and makes us reflect on ourselves and our human nature. In that sense alone, you need to protect the apes.

Empathy probably started out as a mechanism to improve maternal care. Mammalian mothers who were attentive to their young's needs were more likely to rear successful offspring.

I was too restless as a boy to sit through an entire mass. It was akin to aversion training. I looked at it like a puppet show with a totally predictable story line. The only aspect I really liked was the music.

Very long ago our ancestors had moral systems. Our current institutions are only a couple of thousand years old, which is really not old in the eyes of a biologist.

Male bonobos really don't fit the human male ideal.

There's a long tradition in Western thought that humans are not shackled by biology, whereas animals are pure instinct machines.

Most exotic animals are not particularly interested in people, which makes it hard to provoke them. Human-rearing gets them used to and sometimes imprinted on humans, which makes them potentially dangerous.

The primate laugh is given in playful contexts, and as such has a strong similarity to the human laugh.

When humans behave murderously, such as inflicting senseless slaughter of innocents in warfare, we like to blame it on some dark, 'animalistic' instinct.

There are beautiful examples of art done by chimpanzees in human care.

You should know as much as you can about the human species if you have a hand in designing human society.

If you look at human society, it is very easy, of course, to compare our warfare and territoriality with the chimpanzee. But that's only one side of what we do. We also trade, we intermarry, we allow each other to travel through our territory. There's an enormous amount of cooperation.