If you ask anyone, what is morality based on? These are the two factors that always come out: One is reciprocity, … a sense of fairness, and the other one is empathy and compassion.

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.

The enemy of science is not religion... . The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Ignorance is your opponent, fear is your enemy, vice is your adversary, virtue is your friend, and wisdom is your helper.

As a rule, men worry more about what they can't see than about what they can.

Hamish's right arm was around Angus's waist as the two of them tangoed past.

Men come together in cities in order to live: they remain together in order to live the good life

When facts are few, speculations are most likely to represent individual psychology.

There is only one real comfort and it’s not a feeling. It is the comfort of oneness.

I can almost always write music; at any hour of the twenty-four, if I put pencil to paper, music comes.

The man who eats to live, who is friends with the five powers - earth, water, ether, sun and air - who is a servant of God, the Creator of all these, ought not to fall ill.

A life without love is like a year without spring.

It is the abiding faith of mortals that mortality is a temporary condition.