quotations about apes
Apes are never more beasts than when they wear men's clothes.
THOMAS FULLER
Gnomologia
He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! There's even something--sub-human--something not quite to the stage of humanity yet! Yes, something--ape-like about him, like one of those pictures I've seen in--anthropological studies! Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is--Stanley Kowalski--survivor of the Stone Age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! And you--you here--waiting for him! Maybe he'll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have been discovered yet! Night falls and the other apes gather! There in the front of the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and hulking! His poker night!--you call it--this party of apes! Somebody growls--some creature snatches at something--the fight is on!
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
A Streetcar Named Desire
My family tree spreads wide as well. I am a great ape, and you are a great ape, and so are chimpanzees and orangutans and bonobos, all of us distant and distrustful cousins.
KATHERINE APPLEGATE
The One and Only Ivan
If you live with apes man, it's hard to be clean.
MARILYN MANSON
"The Beautiful People"
Baboons and apes ridiculous we find;
For what? For ill resembling Human-kind.
WILLIAM CONGREVE
The Works of Mr. Congreve in Two Volumes
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.
RICHARD DAWKINS
A Devil's Chaplain
I am an ape--I stand and wait
A masterpiece--a hairy beast
No need to hide--come on inside
I will not last--I too shall pass
DAVID BYRNE
"I Am an Ape"
Oh, oobee doo (hoopdeewee)
I wanna be like you-hoo-hoo (hapdeedoobydoowop)
I wanna walk like you (cheep)
Talk like you too-oo-o (weebydeebydeewoo)
You'll see it's true (shoobedeedoo)
An ape like me-e-e (scoobeedoobeedoobeep)
Can learn to be
Human too-oo-oo!
LOUIS PRIMA
"I Wanna Be Like You", The Jungle Book
Apes are apes, though clothed in scarlet.
BEN JONSON
The Poetaster
He doth like the ape, that the higher he climbs the more he shows his arse.
FRANCIS BACON
Promus
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.
DESMOND MORRIS
introduction, The Naked Ape
Why do you find it so strange that in some countries it is apes who enjoy the favours of young ladies? After all, they are one-quarter human, just as I am one-quarter Spanish.
VOLTAIRE
Candide
Apes or human -- we all made the same mistake, tempted by shifting leaves or the smell of sex, by music or a ripe banana.
KATHRYN DAVIS
Duplex
I've decided language isn't as advanced as we think it is. We're still apes trying to express our thoughts with grunts while most of what we want to communicate stays locked in our brain.
GLENDY VANDERAH
Where the Forest Meets the Stars
He allowed for the possibility that perhaps apes are like natural man, who did not speak simply because he had no reason to do so.
MARY EFROSINI GREGORY
Evolutionism in Eighteenth-Century French Thought
See in the shapes of my body
Leftover parts from apes and monkeys
CRASH TEST DUMMIES
"In the Days of the Caveman"
I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape.
DESMOND MORRIS
The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The ape, vilest of beasts, how like to us!
ENNIUS
attributed, De Natura Deorum
Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes -- that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
We Should All Be Feminists