Top 120 Frans de Waal Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.”

— Frans de Waal

2. “I think we need to start thinking about grounding our moral systems in our biology.”

— Frans de Waal

3. “To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.”

— Frans de Waal

4. “You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions.”

— Frans de Waal

5. “Darwin wasn’t just provocative in saying that we descend from the apes – he didn’t go far enough. We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tailless bodies to our habits and temperament.”

— Frans de Waal

6. “Religions have a strong binding function and a cohesive element. They emphasize the primacy of the community as opposed to the individual, and they also help set one community apart from another that doesn’t share their beliefs.”

— Frans de Waal

7. “If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee’s eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?”

— Frans de Waal

8. “Are we open-minded enough to assume that other species have a mental life? Are we creative enough to investigate it? Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them.”

— Frans de Waal

9. “Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies.”

— Frans de Waal

10. “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.”

— Frans de Waal

11. “I am personally not against keeping animals at zoos, as they serve a huge educational purpose, but treating them well and with respect seems the least we could do, and with ‘we’ I mean not just zoo staff, but most certainly also the public.”

— Frans de Waal

12. “We are territorial, power-hungry and even more brutal than chimpanzees.”

— Frans de Waal

13. “The sturdiest pillars of human morality are compassion and a sense of justice.”

— Frans de Waal

14. “I describe in ‘Chimpanzee Politics’ how the alpha male needs broad support to reach the top spot. He needs some close allies and he needs many group members to be on his side.”

— Frans de Waal

15. “One early November morning, while the days were getting colder, I noticed that Franje, a female chimpanzee, was gathering all the straw from her bedroom. She took it under her arm out onto.”

— Frans de Waal

16. “Morality, after all, has nothing to do with selflessness. On the contrary, self-interest is precisely the basis of the categorical imperative.”

— Frans de Waal

17. “Female bonobos form a strong sisterhood. They rule through female solidarity.”

— Frans de Waal

18. “Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it’s not the origin of it.”

— Frans de Waal

19. “In other words, what is salient to us – such as our own facial features – may not be salient to other species.”

— Frans de Waal

20. “Ironically, torture requires empathy, too, in the sense that one cannot deliberately inflict pain without realizing what is painful.”

— Frans de Waal

21. “Feelings arise when emotions penetrate our consciousness, and we become aware of them.”

— Frans de Waal

22. “Emotions infuse everything with meaning and are the main inspiration of cognition, also in our lives.”

— Frans de Waal

23. “War is evitable if conditions are such that the costs of making war are higher than the benefits.”

— Frans de Waal

24. “Without agreement on rank and a certain respect for authority there can be no great sensitivity to social rules, as anyone who has tried to teach simple house rules to a cat will agree.”

— Frans de Waal

25. “If you wish to expel religion from our European civilization you can only do it through another system of doctrines, and from the outset this would take over all the psychological characteristics of religion, the same sanctity, rigidity, and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought in self-defense.”

— Frans de Waal

26. “Although elephants are far more distantly related to us than the great apes, they seem to have evolved similar social and cognitive capacities.”

— Frans de Waal

27. “It wasn’t God who introduced us to morality; rather, it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we felt we ought to.”

— Frans de Waal

28. “To neglect the common ground with other primates, and to deny the evolutionary roots of human morality, would be like arriving at the top of a tower to declare that the rest of the building is irrelevant, that the precious concept of “tower” ought to be reserved for the summit.”

— Frans de Waal

29. “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.”

— Frans de Waal

30. “If I were God, I’d work on the reach of empathy.”

— Frans de Waal

31. “There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don’t have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The.”

— Frans de Waal

32. “The role of inequity in society is grossly underestimated. Inequity is not good for your health, basically.”

— Frans de Waal

33. “Denmark has incredibly low crime rates, and parents feel that what a child needs most is frisk luft, or fresh air. The.”

— Frans de Waal

34. “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.”

— Frans de Waal

35. “Competitiveness is just as much a part of our nature as empathy. The ideal, in my view, is a democratic system with a social market economy, because it takes both tendencies into account.”

— Frans de Waal

36. “The thinking is that we started evolving language not by speaking but by gesturing.”

— Frans de Waal

37. “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.”

— Frans de Waal

38. “As far as the environment is concerned, I am becoming pessimistic because I do not see anybody stepping up and taking the long view approach. It seems like we’re stuck in a tragedy of the commons where everyone is trying to contribute as little as possible to get out of this situation.”

— Frans de Waal

39. “In humans, the family prevents infanticide. Next to language, the core family, consisting of a mother, a father and children, is the greatest difference between us and other primates.”

— Frans de Waal

40. “The bonobo would first of all urge the atheist to stop “sleeping furiously.” There is no point getting all worked up about the absence of something, especially something as open to interpretation as God.”

— Frans de Waal

41. “Socialism cannot function, because its economic reward structure is contrary to human nature.”

— Frans de Waal

42. “Emotions help us navigate a complex world that we don’t fully comprehend. They are our body’s way of ensuring that we do what is best for us.”

— Frans de Waal

43. “We are by far the most contradictory of all primates. An animal with this much internal conflict has never lived on this earth.”

— Frans de Waal

44. “In the third century, Tertullian of Carthage, an early Christian theologian, had a most unusual vision of heaven. While hell was a place of torture, heaven was a balcony from which the saved ones could watch hell, thus enjoying the spectacle of doomed souls frying in the fire.”

— Frans de Waal

45. “It is well known that apes in the wild offer spontaneous assistance to each other, defending against leopards, say, or consoling distressed companions with tender embraces.”

— Frans de Waal

46. “The intuitive connection children feel with animals can be a tremendous source of joy. The unconditional love received from pets, and the lack of artifice in the relationship, contrast sharply with the much trickier dealings with members of their own species.”

— Frans de Waal

47. “When it comes to social interaction, the chimpanzees appear to be just as intelligent as we are.”

— Frans de Waal

48. “Humanity’s special place in the cosmos is one of abandoned claims and moving goalposts.”

— Frans de Waal

49. “Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.”

— Frans de Waal

50. “Harry Harlow, a well-known American primatologist, was an early critic of the hunger reduction model. He argued that intelligent animals learn mostly through curiosity and free exploration, both of which are likely killed by a narrow fixation on food. He poked fun at the Skinner box, seeing it as a splendid instrument to demonstrate the effectiveness of food rewards but not to study complex behavior.”

— Frans de Waal