Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Science is not inherently good.
Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies.
Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.
If I were God, I'd work on the reach of empathy.
Male bonobos really don't fit the human male ideal.
Exclusive homosexuality is not very common in nature.
Future benefits rarely figure in the minds of animals.
Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners.
The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be.
There are many reasons for kindness, and religion is just one of them.
There are beautiful examples of art done by chimpanzees in human care.
Very ancient parts of the brain are involved in moral decision making.
We are territorial, power-hungry and even more brutal than chimpanzees.
Robin Hood had it right.Humanity's deepest wish is to spread the wealth.
Understanding the need for religion is a far superior goal to bashing it.
Female bonobos form a strong sisterhood. They rule through female solidarity.
The sturdiest pillars of human morality are compassion and a sense of justice.
I'm personally a nonbeliever, so I'm struggling with if we really need religion.
The hamadryas baboon is a harem holder where one male mates with multiple females.
The thinking is that we started evolving language not by speaking but by gesturing.
I think we need to start thinking about grounding our moral systems in our biology.
Humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than [it's] given credit for.
The chimpanzees could tear me apart in no time. They're many times stronger than we are.
There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors.
Socialism cannot function, because its economic reward structure is contrary to human nature.
When it comes to social interaction, the chimpanzees appear to be just as intelligent as we are.
War is evitable if conditions are such that the costs of making war are higher than the benefits.
You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions.
The primate laugh is given in playful contexts, and as such has a strong similarity to the human laugh.
You should know as much as you can about the human species if you have a hand in designing human society.
We would much rather blame nature for what we don't like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like.
If both parties have a stake in the other, the chances of them killing each other are going to be reduced.
Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it.
The role of inequity in society is grossly underestimated. Inequity is not good for your health, basically.
Male chimpanzees have an extraordinarily strong drive for dominance. They're constantly jockeying for position.
A chimpanzee who is really gearing up for a fight doesn't waste time with gestures but just goes ahead and attacks.
There is little evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves.
The enemy of science is not religion... . The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.
Personally, I think it is possible to build a society that is moral on a nonreligious basis, but the jury is still out on that.
We are by far the most contradictory of all primates. An animal with this much internal conflict has never lived on this earth.
There's a long tradition in Western thought that humans are not shackled by biology, whereas animals are pure instinct machines.
When someone brutally kills someone else, we call him "animalistic." But we consider ourselves "human" when we give to the poor.
We need to separate the process of evolution - which is, indeed, a self-serving process - and the actual motivations of animals.
Armies are a purely human invention. Most soldiers who go to war nowadays don't even do it because they're inherently aggressive.
Perhaps it's just me, but I am wary of any persons whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior.
There has been so much underestimating of animal cognition that to perhaps overestimate it, as I probably do, is probably a healthy reaction.
Morality, after all, has nothing to do with selflessness. On the contrary, self-interest is precisely the basis of the categorical imperative.
Although elephants are far more distantly related to us than the great apes, they seem to have evolved similar social and cognitive capacities.
People want to work with somebody who feels shame, who worries about the perceptions of others. Dishonesty is something we don't like in others.
We justify the inequalities by saying some people are just better and smarter than others and the strong should survive and the poor can die off.