Simians

"A buzzard took the monkey for a ride in the air The monkey thought that everything was on the square The buzzard tried to throw the monkey off his back But the monkey grabbed his neck and said — "Now listen, Jack..." "Straighten up and fly right Straighten up and fly right Straighten up and fly right Cool down, papa, don't you blow your top.""

"Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape Who dost in every country change thy shape!"

"Every one has seen how jealous a dog is of his master's affection, if lavished on any other creature; and I have observed the same fact with monkeys."

"Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey."

"The ape, vilest of beasts, how like to us."

"The anger of an ape—the threat of a flatterer:—these deserve equal regard."

"The art does not belong to apes or angels, but to us. We deserve art that speaks to us as complete human beings. Why settle for anything less?"

"Monkeys, who very sensibly refrain from speech lest they should be set to earn their livings."

"I’ll take you apart. Look, we don’t deny that apes and monkeys learn. They are bright, and they learn continuously. As soon as a situation changes, or a new ability matures, learning is overlaid on innate qualities, and it becomes difficult to tell them apart. But the innate components are there."

"Cats and monkey, monkey and cats - all human life is there."

"Our road lay through the bazaar, close to a little temple of Hanuman, the Monkey-god, who is a leading divinity worthy of respect. All gods have good points, just as have all priests. Personally, I attach much importance to Hanuman, and am kind to his people—the great gray apes of the hills. One never knows when one may want a friend."

"Mein Gott! I would sooner collect life red devils than liddle monkey."

"What one fool can do, another can."

"Ein Buch ist Spiegel, aus dem kein Apostel herausgucken kann, wenn ein Affe hineinguckt."

"Ihr habt den Weg vom Wurme zum Menschen gemacht, und Vieles ist in euch noch Wurm. Einst wart ihr Affen, und auch jetzt ist der Mensch mehr Affe, als irgend ein Affe."

"Seht sie klettern, diese geschwinden Affen! Sie klettern über einander hinweg und zerren sich also in den Schlamm und die Tiefe. Hin zum Throne wollen sie Alle: ihr Wahnsinn ist es, — als ob das Glück auf dem Throne sässe! Oft sitzt der Schlamm auf dem Thron — und oft auch der Thron auf dem Schlamme. Wahnsinnige sind sie mir Alle und kletternde Affen und Überheisse. Übel riecht mir ihr Götze, das kalte Unthier: übel riechen sie mir alle zusammen, diese Götzendiener."

"The chimpanzees in the zoos do it, Some courageous kangaroos do it Let's do it, let's fall in love.I'm sure giraffes on the sly do it, Even eagles as they fly do it, Let's do it, let's fall in love."

"I'd rather be a climbing ape than a falling angel."

"The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food. Artistic genius is an expansion of monster imitativeness."

"It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?"

"Triumphs for nothing, and lamenting toys,Is jollity for apes and grief for boys."

"The strain of man's bred out Into baboons and monkey."

"Orangutans are skepticalOf changes in their cages,And the zookeeper is very fond of rum."

"Oh how the VacancyLaughed at them rushing by."Turn again, flesh and brain,Only yourselves again!How far above the apeDiffering in each shape,You with your regularMeaningless circles are!""

"Everywhere men have unlocked the prisoners within, and from under the disguising skins the apes have leapt joyfully out."

"The monkey sat on a pile of stoneAnd he stared at the broken bone in his handStrains of a Viennese quartet rang out across the landThe monster looked up at the starsAnd he thought to himselfMemory is a strangerHistory is for foolsAnd he cleaned his hands in a pool of holy writingTurned his back on the garden and set out for the nearest town""

"Al draagt een aap een gouden ring, het is en blijft een lelijk ding."

"القرد فى عين امه غزال"

"ياواخد القرد علي ماله يروح المال و يفضل القرد علي حاله"

"Ce n'est pas aux vieux singes qu'on apprend à faire des grimaces."

"Jwe ak makak, men pa manyen ke-l."

"बंदर क्या जाने अदरक का स्वाद ।"

"Margur verður af aurum api."

"Kalo di hutan tak ada singa, beruk rabun bisa menjadi raja."

"ಮಂಗನ ಪಾರುಪತ್ಯ ಮರದ ಟೊಂಗೆ ಮೇಲೆ"

"Em rio que tem piranha, macaco bebe água de canudinho."

"Siku ya kufa nyani miti yote huteleza."

"We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses."

"If you start putting very large numbers of human brain cells into primates, suddenly you might transform primates into something that has some of the capacities that we regard as distinctively human – speech or other ways of being able to manipulate or relate to a human. These possibilities, at the moment, are largely being explored in fiction but we need to start thinking about them now."

"I seem to see only the strivings of an ape reft of his tail, and grown rusty at climbing, who has reeled blunderingly from mystery to mystery, with pathetic makeshifts, not understanding anything, greedy in all desires, and always honeycombed with poltroonery. So in a secret place his youth was put away in exchange for a prize that was hardly worth the having; and the fine geas which his mother laid upon him was exchanged for the common geas of what seems expected."

"The word 'apes' usually means chimpanzees, gorillas, orang utans, gibbons, and simangs. We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes – the gibbons and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans."

"The least I can do is speak out for the hundreds of chimpanzees who, right now, sit hunched, miserable and without hope, staring out with dead eyes from their metal prisons. They cannot speak for themselves."

"I do not want to discuss evolution in such depth, however, only touch on it from my own perspective: from the moment when I stood on the Serengeti plains holding the fossilized bones of ancient creatures in my hands to the moment when, staring into the eyes of a chimpanzee, I saw a thinking, reasoning personality looking back. You may not believe in evolution, and that is all right. How we humans came to be the way we are is far less important than how we should act now to get out of the mess we have made for ourselves."

"You can imagine my dismay when I got to Cambridge and found that I had done everything wrong. I shouldn't have named the chimps; I should have given them numbers. I couldn't talk about their personalities, their minds or their feelings because that was unique to us."

"Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutan shave been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forest, living fantastic lives, never overpopulating, never destroying the forest. I would say that they have been in a way more successful than us as far as being in harmony with the environment."

"At the moment, money from Gombe tourism goes into one pot for Tanzania National Parks and it has to pay for the whole infrastructure of everything. But through our TACARE [community development] programme, we’ve benefited local people hugely. The thing is about tourism and research is that they can both focus attention on the place and help to preserve it. It’s tourism involvement with the mountain gorillas that saved them. During the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, people on both sides were being told, “Don’t touch the gorillas”, as it was the second biggest foreign exchange earner after tea in the country. So both sides hoped to win and continue exploiting gorillas. So the government can see the value of tourism, but the danger is they over-exploit it. They say, “We’re getting all this money for [gorilla-tracking groups of] six people, now we’ll let it be 12”, and they get more money for tours, so they make it 20. That’s the danger; that they end up killing what people have come to see."

"A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there was an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man — a man of restless and versatile intellect — who not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them with aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice."

"There is thus a certain plausibility to Nietzsche's doctrine, though it is dynamite. He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee."

"Actually, the gap between say Plato or Nietzsche and the average human is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human."

"People may choose to ignore their animal heritage by interpreting their behavior as divinely inspired, socially purposeful, or even self-serving, all of which they attribute to being human, but they masticate, fornicate, and procreate, much as chimps and apes do, so they should have little cause to get upset if they learn that they act like other primates when they politically agitate, debate, abdicate, placate, and administrate, too."