A Primate's Memoir Quotes

“We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

“Suddenly, I get this giddy desire to shock these guys a little. I continue, “These baboons really are our relatives. In fact, this baboon is my cousin.” And with that I lean over and give Daniel a loud messy kiss on his big ol’ nose. I get more of a response than I bargained for. The Masai freak and suddenly, they are waving their spears real close to my face, like they mean it. One is yelling, “He is not your cousin, he is not your cousin! A baboon cannot even cook ugali!” (Ugali is the ubiquitous and repulsive maize meal that everyone eats here. I almost respond that I don’t really know how to cook the stuff either, but decide to show some prudence at last.) “He is not your cousin!”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

“The funeral service was held near her cabin, a week after Christmas, and was conducted by a missionary who said, “Last week the world did honor to a long-ago event that changed its history—the coming of the Lord to earth. We see at our feet here a parable of that magnificent condescension—Dian Fossey, born to a home of comfort and privilege that she left by her own choice to live among a race faced with extinction.… And if you think that the distance Christ had to come to take the likeness of Man is not so great as that from man to gorilla, then you don’t know men. Or gorillas. Or God.” And, as per her wish, she was buried in the graveyard of her slain gorillas, next to Digit.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

“And there they are: skulky, cowardly, dirty, snively, skeevy, no-account hyenas lurking at the periphery, trying to grab a piece of the vittles. Marlin practically invites us to heap our contempt on the hyenas: scavengers. Now, it’s not entirely clear to me why we laud the predators so much and so disdain the scavengers, since most of us are hardening our arteries wolfing down carcasses that someone else killed, but that is our bias. Lions get lionized, while hyenas never get to vocalize at the beginning of MGM movies.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

“Two fantasies dominated my darting then. I wanted to dart Fritz Lipmann. Lipmann was an incredibly famous biochemist, got the Nobel Prize decades ago, and now was an august octogenarian who would spend his day shuffling around the campus in his running shoes, endlessly passing my first-floor dorm window. I would get him in my blowgun sights from behind my biochemistry textbooks (which were half about him), choose between his rear end and shoulders, try to calculate his body weight for a proper dosage. I refrained from darting, however.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir: Love, Death and Baboons

“Displaced aggression” is the term for it, and an incredible percentage of baboon aggression consists of someone in a bad mood taking it out on an innocent bystander.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

“The Jeep is half a kilometer away over a ridge, you have to spirit him away without anyone else in the troop seeing you or else they’ll freak and rip you to shreds. Seventy-pound baboon wrapped in burlap, and you’re tiptoeing through the middle of the troop, arms aching, trying not to run or giggle or collapse from exhaustion. The guy’s snoring and you try to shush him.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons