Top 35 Desmond Morris Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.”

— Desmond Morris

2. “In a social environment that is ever crowded and impersonal, it is becoming increasingly important to reconsider the value of close personal relationships before we are driven to ask the forlorn question, ‘Whatever happened to love?’”

— Desmond Morris

3. “Biologically speaking, if something bites you it’s more likely to be female.”

— Desmond Morris

4. “We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species.”

— Desmond Morris

5. “I think like the species I am studying, whatever it is. If I am watching a lizard, I become the lizard. Gazing ath the water at a pike, I become the pike.”

— Desmond Morris

6. “The roots of our Soccer Tribe lie deep in our primeval past.”

— Desmond Morris

7. “We may prefer to think of ourselves as fallen angels, but in reality we are rising apes.”

— Desmond Morris

8. “Sexual behavior in our species goes through three characteristic phases: pair formation, precopulatory activity, and copulation, usually but not always in that order. The pair-formation stage, usually referred to as courtship, is remarkably prolonged by animal standards.”

— Desmond Morris

9. “The age of a child is inversely correlated with the size of the animals it prefers.”

— Desmond Morris

10. “We are to put it mildly, in a mess, and there is a strong chance that we shall have exterminated ourselves by the end of the century. Our only consolation will be that as a species, we have had an exciting term of office.”

— Desmond Morris

11. “There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens. The zoologist now has to start making comparisons. Where else is nudity at a premium.”

— Desmond Morris

12. “Life is like a very short visit to a toy shop between birth and death.”

— Desmond Morris

13. “A true bond of friendship is usually only possible between people of roughly equal status. This equality is demonstrated in many indirect ways, but it is reinforced in face-to-face encounters by a matching of the posture of relaxation or alertness.”

— Desmond Morris

14. “The female covers her breasts, and then proceeds to redefine their shape with a brassiere. This sexual signaling device may be padded or inflatable, so that it not only reinstates the concealed shape, but also enlarges it, imitating in this way the breast swelling that occurs during sexual arousal.”

— Desmond Morris

15. “No matter how old we become, we can still call them ‘Holy Mother’ and ‘Father’ and put a child-like trust in them.”

— Desmond Morris

16. “Artists like cats; soldiers like dogs.”

— Desmond Morris

17. “I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape.”

— Desmond Morris

18. “Monks, nuns, long-term spinsters and bachelors and permanent homosexuals are all, in a reproductive sense, aberrant. Society has bred them, but they have failed to return the compliment.”

— Desmond Morris

19. “We like to think of this as the conquest of bestial weaknesses by the powers of intellectual altruism, as if ethics and morality were some kind of modern invention. If this were really true, it is doubtful if we would be here today to proclaim it. If we did not carry in us the basic biological urge to co-operate with our fellow men, we would never have survived as a species.”

— Desmond Morris

20. “Aquatic animals suffer from the disadvantage that they cannot scream when in pain, so we find it hard to gauge the degree of their agony. If fish could scream, angling purely for sport would be outlawed without delay.”

— Desmond Morris

21. “The establishment’s reply is that dissenting students are bent, not on positive innovation, but on negative disruption. Against this, however, it can be argued that these two processes are very closely related and that the former only degenerates into the latter when it finds itself blocked.”

— Desmond Morris

22. “Under crowded conditions the friendly social interactions between members of a group become reduced, and the destructive and aggressive patterns show a marked rise in frequency and intensity.”

— Desmond Morris

23. “It is interesting that amongst children of preschool age, the more intelligent ones tend to sleep less than the dull ones. After the age of seven this relationship is reversed, the more intelligent schoolchildren sleeping more than the dull ones.”

— Desmond Morris

24. “The response of teenagers to their idols is relevant. As an audience, they enjoy themselves, not by screaming with laughter, but screaming with screams.”

— Desmond Morris

25. “Looking back now on the whole sexual scene we can see that our species has remained much more loyal to its basic biological urges than we might at first imagine. Its primate sexual system with carnivore modifications has survived all the fantastic technological advances remarkably well.”

— Desmond Morris

26. “Frequently we imagine that we are behaving in a particular way because such behaviour accords with some abstract, lofty code of moral principles, when in reality all we are doing is obeying a deeply ingrained and long ‘forgotten’ set of purely imitative impressions.”

— Desmond Morris

27. “The news that is brought to us is nearly always bad news, but for every act of violence or destruction that occurs there are a million acts of peaceful friendliness.”

— Desmond Morris

28. “This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time ignoring his fundamental ones.”

— Desmond Morris

29. “In an earlier chapter I mentioned recent research which has shown that the preference for sweet and fruity odours falls off dramatically at puberty, when there is a shift in favour of flowery, oily and musky odours. The juvenile weakness for sweetness can be easily exploited, and frequently is.”

— Desmond Morris

30. “As long as the human race is able to concern itself with more than mere survival, soccer will have its place.”

— Desmond Morris

31. “The word ‘love’ is, in fact, the way we commonly describe the emotional feelings that accompany the imprinting process.”

— Desmond Morris

32. “There is nothing biologically unusual about a homosexual act of pseudocopulation. Many species indulge in this, under a variety of circumstances.”

— Desmond Morris

33. “A belief in the validity of the acquisition of knowledge and a scientific understanding of the world we live in, the creation and appreciation of aesthetic phenomena in all their many forms, and the broadening and deepening of our range of experiences in day-to-day living, is rapidly becoming the ‘religion’ of our time.”

— Desmond Morris

34. “This is one of the prices that the biological tribesman must pay for becoming an artificial super-tribesman. The only solution is to find a brilliant, rational, balanced, deep-thinking brain housed in a glamorous, flamboyant, self-assertive, colourful personality. Contradictory? Yes. Impossible? Perhaps; but there is a glimmer of hope in the fact that the very size of the super-tribe, which causes the problem in the first place, also offers literally millions of potential candidates.”

— Desmond Morris

35. “The only reason why we are always having the doctrine of original sin instilled into us, in one form or another, is that the artificial conditions of the super-tribe keep on working against our biological altruism, and it needs all the help it can get.”

— Desmond Morris

36. “As a species we may be technologically clever and philosophically brilliant, but we have not lost our animal property of being physically active;.”

— Desmond Morris