Top 120 Frans de Waal Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I’m personally a nonbeliever, so I’m struggling with if we really need religion.”

— Frans de Waal

102. “Our desire for sharp divisions is at odds with evolution’s habit of making extremely smooth transitions.”

— Frans de Waal

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

— Frans de Waal

104. “There are so many ways to account for negative outcomes that it is safer to doubt one’s methods before doubting one’s subjects.”

— Frans de Waal

105. “Bonobo studies started in the ’70s and came to fruition in the ’80s. Then in the ’90s, all of a sudden, boom, they ended because of the warfare in the Congo. It was really bad for the bonobo and ironic that people with their warfare were preventing us from studying the hippies of the primate world.”

— Frans de Waal

106. “The common argument that men are naturally polygamous and women naturally monogamous is as full of holes as Swiss cheese.”

— Frans de Waal

107. “When we are bad, we are worse than any primate that I know. And when we are good, we are actually better and more altruistic than any primate that I know.”

— Frans de Waal

108. “At the time, science had declared humans unique, since we were so much better at identifying faces than any other primate. No one seemed bothered by the fact that other primates had been tested mostly on human faces rather than those of their own kind.”

— Frans de Waal

109. “Animals should be given a chance to express their natural behavior.”

— Frans de Waal

110. “The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing.”

— Frans de Waal

111. “The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures.”

— Frans de Waal

112. “Rather than reflecting an immutable human nature, morals are closely tied to the way we organize ourselves.”

— Frans de Waal

113. “Empathic reactions are always stronger the more we have in common with the other and the closer we feel to them.20.”

— Frans de Waal

114. “Instead of being a surface phenomenon in our expanded neocortex, moral decision-making apparently taps into millions of years of social evolution.”

— Frans de Waal

115. “If people laugh at primates at the zoo, they do so, I suspect, precisely because they’re unsettled by the mirror held up to them.”

— Frans de Waal

116. “Life goes on, as it should, but individuals are unique.”

— Frans de Waal

117. “We have a tendency to describe the human condition in lofty terms, such as a quest for freedom or striving for a virtuous life, but the life sciences hold a more mundane view: It’s all about security, social companionships, and a full belly. There is obvious tension between both views, which recalls that famous dinner conversation between a Russian literary critic and the writer Ivan Turgenev: ‘We haven’t yet solved the problem of God,’ the critic yelled, ’and you want to eat!”

— Frans de Waal

118. “Imagine you’re a writer, and you have decided to offer your readers a firsthand account of the politically correct primate, the idol of the left, known for its “gay” relations, female supremacy, and pacific lifestyle. Your focus is the bonobo: a close relation of the chimpanzee. You.”

— Frans de Waal

119. “Male chimpanzees have an extraordinarily strong drive for dominance. They’re constantly jockeying for position.”

— Frans de Waal

120. “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.”

— Frans de Waal

121. “Emotions evolved, in short, for their capacity to induce adaptive reactions to danger, competition, mating opportunities, and so on. Emotions are action-prone. Our species shares many emotions with the other primates because we rely on approximately the same behavioral repertoire.”

— Frans de Waal

122. “Conventions are often surrounded with the solemn language of morality, but in fact they have little to do with it.”

— Frans de Waal

123. “If faith makes people buy an entire package of myths and values without asking too many questions, scientists are only slightly better.”

— Frans de Waal

124. “Having spent all my life among academics, I can tell you that hearing how wrong they area is about as high on their priority list as finding a cockroach in their coffee. The typical scientist has made an interesting discovery early on in his or her career, followed by a lifetime of making sure that everyone else admires his or her contribution and that no one questions it. There is no poorer company than an aging scientist who has failed to achieve these objectives.”

— Frans de Waal

125. “This is more like the scientists I know. Authority outweighs evidence, at least for as long as the authority lives.”

— Frans de Waal

126. “Emotions often know better than we do what is good for us, even though not everyone is prepared to listen.”

— Frans de Waal

127. “Harold Laswell’s famous definition of politics as a social process determining “who gets what, when, and how,” there can be little doubt that chimpanzees engage in it. Since in both humans and their closest relatives the process involves bluff, coalitions, and isolation tactics, a common terminology is warranted.”

— Frans de Waal

128. “Armies are a purely human invention. Most soldiers who go to war nowadays don’t even do it because they’re inherently aggressive.”

— Frans de Waal

129. “There is so much resistance to the idea of animal culture that one cannot escape the impression that it is an idea whose time is come.”

— Frans de Waal

130. “The default mode of the human primate is intensely social, as reflected in our favorite activities, from attending sports matches and singing in choirs to partying and socializing.”

— Frans de Waal

131. “While the matriarch operates on the basis of knowledge, the rest of the herd operates on the basis of trust.”

— Frans de Waal

132. “Feelings happen when emotions bubble to the surface so that we become aware of them. When we are conscious of our emotions, we are able to express them in words and make others aware of them:.”

— Frans de Waal

133. “Ayn Rand, the Russian-American novelist and would-be philosopher, needed such boring heavy tomes full of bloodless characters to make her case. Her main point was that we are unalloyed individualists, but she had to work hard to convince us, because deep down everyone knows that this is not who or what we are. Rather than a description of our species, Rand offered a counterintuitive ideological construct.”

— Frans de Waal

134. “Human beings evolved to reverberate with the emotional states of others, to the point that we internalize, mostly via our bodies, what is going on with them. This is social connectivity at its best, the glue of all animal and human societies, which guarantees supportive and comforting company.”

— Frans de Waal

135. “The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to makes us happy, but we’re not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them “animals”. But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being “humane”. We like to claim the latter behavior for ourselves.”

— Frans de Waal

136. “Without emotions we wouldn’t store memories, because it’s the emotions that make them salient. Without emotions we would remain unmoved by others, who in turn would remain unmoved by us. We would be like ships sailing past each other.”

— Frans de Waal

137. “Perhaps religion is like a ship that has carried us across the ocean, having allowed us to develop huge societies with a well-functioning morality. Now that we are spotting land, some of us are ready to disembark.”

— Frans de Waal

138. “The eyeless tick climbs onto a grass stem to await the smell of butyric acid emanating from mammalian skin. Since experiments have shown that this arachnid can go for eighteen years without food, the tick has ample time to meet a mammal, drop onto her victim, and gorge herself on warm blood. Afterward she is ready to lay her eggs and die.”

— Frans de Waal

139. “At birth, girl babies look longer at faces than do boy babies, who look longer at mechanical toys. Later in life, girls are more prosocial than boys, better readers of facial expressions, more attuned to voices, more remorseful after having hurt someone, and better at taking another’s perspective.32 The same differences have been found in self-report studies of human adults.”

— Frans de Waal