Top 120 Frans de Waal Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The hamadryas baboon is a harem holder where one male mates with multiple females.”

— Frans de Waal

52. “Male bonobos really don’t fit the human male ideal.”

— Frans de Waal

53. “Empathy as a complex emotion is different. It requires awareness of the other person’s feelings and of one’s own reactions. The appropriate reaction may not be to cry when another person cries, but to reassure them, or even to leave them alone.”

— Frans de Waal

54. “It is hard to get animals which normally pay little attention to each other to do things together. One can teach dolphins to jump simultaneously out of the water precisely because they show similar behavior spontaneously, but try to make two domestic cats jump together and you will fail.”

— Frans de Waal

55. “Werner Heisenberg put it, “what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Heisenberg, a German physicist, made this observation regarding quantum mechanics, but it holds equally true for explorations of the animal.”

— Frans de Waal

56. “Octopuses have hundreds of suckers, each one equipped with its own ganglion with thousands of neurons. These ‘mini-brains’ are interconnected, making for a widely distributed nervous system. That is why a severed octopus arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food.”

— Frans de Waal

57. “I was raised Catholic. Not just a little bit Catholic, like my wife, Catherine. When she was young, many Catholics in France already barely went to church, except for the big three: baptism, marriage, and funeral. And only the middle one was by choice.”

— Frans de Waal

58. “Dog owners who stare into their pet’s eyes experience a rapid increase in oxytocin – a neuropeptide involved in attachment and bonding. Exchanging gazes full of empathy and trust, we enjoy a special relationship with the dog.42.”

— Frans de Waal

59. “We, who think like animals living in small groups, must structure a global world. We believe in universal human rights and believe racism and war are wrong. On the other hand, it is our nature to be cooperative and loving almost exclusively with the members of the group to which we feel we belong.”

— Frans de Waal

60. “Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners.”

— Frans de Waal

61. “In Africa, we have the bush meat trade, which means that, on a very large scale, animals are being killed in the forests and sold in the cities as a luxury food.”

— Frans de Waal

62. “We are so logic-driven that we can’t stand the absence of it.”

— Frans de Waal

63. “Unlike the primate hand, the elephant’s grasping organ is also its nose. Elephants use their trunks not only to reach food but also to sniff and touch it. With their unparalleled sense of smell, the animals know exactly what they are going for. Vision is secondary.”

— Frans de Waal

64. “Exclusive homosexuality is not very common in nature.”

— Frans de Waal

65. “Science is not inherently good.”

— Frans de Waal

66. “We would much rather blame nature for what we don’t like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like.”

— Frans de Waal

67. “Our societies probably work best if they mimic as closely as possible the small-scale communities of our ancestors. We certainly did not evolve to live in cities with millions of people where we bump into strangers everyone we go, are threatened by them in dark streets, sit next to them in the bus, and give them the finger in traffic jams.”

— Frans de Waal

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

— Frans de Waal

69. “The development of family entities enables men to cooperate far more effectively. Instead of constantly competing for the women with other men, each man essentially has a partner assigned to him, one with whom he can establish a family.”

— Frans de Waal

70. “But those stories inspire observations and experiments that do help us sort out what’s going on. The science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov reportedly once said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.”

— Frans de Waal

71. “They were generally run by young men who mocked authority and preached egalitarianism yet had no qualms about ordering everyone else around and stealing their comrades’ girlfriends.”

— Frans de Waal

72. “I call the notion that we are nothing but killer apes the Beethoven fallacy. Beethoven was disorganized and messy, and yet his music is the epitome of order.”

— Frans de Waal

73. “There’s actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors.”

— Frans de Waal

74. “If you want to design a successful human society, you need to know what kind of animal we are. Are we a social animal or a selfish animal? Do we respond better when we’re solitary or living in a group?”

— Frans de Waal

75. “Wild groups of chimpanzees attack their enemies like gangs. What they completely lack, precisely because of their strong territorial behavior, is a friendly relationship with their neighbors.”

— Frans de Waal

76. “One can train dolphins to jump synchronously because they do so in the wild, and one can teach horses to run together at the same pace because wild horses do the same.”

— Frans de Waal

77. “Chimpanzees, typically, kiss and embrace after fights. They first make eye contact from a distance to see the mood of the others. Then they approach and kiss and embrace.”

— Frans de Waal

78. “There is little evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves.”

— Frans de Waal

79. “When we see a disciplined society, there is often a social hierarchy behind it. This hierarchy, which determines who can eat or mate first, is ultimately rooted in violence.”

— Frans de Waal

80. “After World War II it was decided that, in order to prevent the Germans and the French from having another war, it would be better to tie them together into one economic pact so they would invest in each other and have mutual stakes. Until now, that has worked to prevent warfare between the two.”

— Frans de Waal

81. “A chimpanzee who is really gearing up for a fight doesn’t waste time with gestures but just goes ahead and attacks.”

— Frans de Waal

82. “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.”

— Frans de Waal

83. “The original form is the contagion of fear and alarm. You’re in a flock of birds. One bird suddenly takes off. You have no time to wait and see what’s going on. You take off, too. Otherwise, you’re lunch.”

— Frans de Waal

84. “In other words, both macaques and rats volunteer for tests only when they feel confident, suggesting that they know their own knowledge.”

— Frans de Waal

85. “Emotions may be slippery, but they are also by far the most salient aspect of our lives. They give meaning to everything.”

— Frans de Waal

86. “I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a similar mood. All of a sudden, all of them are playful, hopping around. Or all of them are grumpy. Or all of them are sleepy and settle down. In such cases, the mood contagion serves the function of synchronizing activities.”

— Frans de Waal

87. “Human reflection is chronically overrated, though, and we now suspect that our own reaction to food poisoning is in fact similar to that of rats. Garcia’s findings forced comparative psychology to admit that evolution pushes cognition around, adapting it to the organism’s needs.”

— Frans de Waal

88. “Those who exclaim that “animals are not people” tend to forget that, while true, it is equally true that people are animals. To minimize the complexity of animal behavior without doing the same for human behavior erects an artificial barrier.”

— Frans de Waal

89. “The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be.”

— Frans de Waal

90. “The chimpanzees could tear me apart in no time. They’re many times stronger than we are.”

— Frans de Waal

91. “If both parties have a stake in the other, the chances of them killing each other are going to be reduced.”

— Frans de Waal

92. “Studies of reconciliation in primates have demonstrated that if the relationship value increases between two parties they are more willing to make peace.”

— Frans de Waal

93. “If you look at national economies today, for example, the American economy, the European economy, the Indians, the Chinese, we’re all tied together. If one of them sinks, the rest are going to sink with them and if one floats, the rest are lifted up. I find that very interesting.”

— Frans de Waal

94. “When someone brutally kills someone else, we call him “animalistic.” But we consider ourselves “human” when we give to the poor.”

— Frans de Waal

95. “Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it’s impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognitions of the ape’s. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself.”

— Frans de Waal

96. “I consider dogmatism a far greater threat than religion per se.”

— Frans de Waal

97. “It seems safe to say that apes know about death, such as that is different from life and permanent. The same may apply to a few other animals, such as elephants, which pick up ivory or bones of a dead herd member, holding the pieces in their trunks and passing them around. Some pachyderms return for years to the spot where a relative died, only to touch and inspect the relics. Do they miss each other? Do they recall how he or she was during life?”

— Frans de Waal

98. “Future benefits rarely figure in the minds of animals.”

— Frans de Waal

99. “The evolutionary struggle for survival is really a self-serving series of blows and stabs, and yet it can lead to extremely social animals like dolphins, wolves or, for that matter, primates.”

— Frans de Waal

100. “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.”

— Frans de Waal