Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Frans de Waal

Quote by Frans de Waal

“Every morning, the male and female [Siamang] burst into spectacular duets. [...] Since the song reflects their marriage, the more beautiful it is, the more their neighbors realize not to mess with them. A close-harmony duet communicates not only "stay out!" but also "we're one!" (p. 177)”

Quote by Frans de Waal

Book:Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
Create image

Work

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Frans de Waal
Frans de Waal

Frans de Waal is a renowned primatologist, born on October 29, 1948. His research focuses on the social behavior and cognitive abilities of non-human primates, having a profound impact on human ethology and social psychology. more

You May Also Like

“[Khrushchev] took a trip to America and spent some time in the state of Iowa. He saw how vigorously the maize grows there and decided that the shortcomings of the collective farm system could be counterbalanced if the expanses from Kushka to the tundra were sown with this magical cereal. One word was all it took, and the entire country was planted with maize. It didn’t grow. They divided the party into agricultural and municipal regional committees. It didn’t grow. They transformed the ministries into national economic councils—NECs— and the maize still didn’t grow; it refused. They gave up on the maize and set about introducing a reform of the Russian language that would have meant a hare was called a “her” and instead of “cucumber” people would have written “queucamber.”

CommunismSoviet UnionUssrKhrushchev
Book:Monumental Propaganda
Create image

“Nor did Khrushchev make any attempt at a historical or sociological analysis of the Stalinist system. Stalin had simply been a criminal and a maniac, personally to blame for all the nation's defeats and misfortunes. As to how, and in what social conditions, a blood-thirsty paranoiac could for twenty-five years exercise unlimited despotic power over a country of two hundred million inhabitants, which throughout that period had been blessed with the most progressive and democratic system of government in human history—to this enigma the speech offered no clue whatsoever.”

StalinismKhrushchev
Book:Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown
Create image

“Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. Worst and probably intractable was the fact that people who had spent their lives securing power and individual leverage were expected to devise change that would dismantle the hierarchy of levers and might dislodge them. The system resisted change instinctively...”

RussiaCommunismSoviet UnionMarxismPerestroika
Book:The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
Create image

“Perestroika is an urgent necessity arising from the profound processes of development in our socialist society. This society is ripe for change. It has long been yearning for it. Any delay in beginning perestroika could have led to an exacerbated internal situation in the near future, which, to put it bluntly, would have been fraught with serious social, economic, and political crises.”

Perestroika
Book:Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World
Create image