gun

There’s no such thing as a good gun. There’s no such thing as a bad gun. A gun in the hands of a bad monkey is a very dangerous thing. A gun in the hands of a good monkey is no danger to anyone except the bad monkeys.
— Charlkop Heston

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. This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time studiously ignoring his fundamental ones.
 — Desmond Morris

I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later — or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!
 — Frans de Waal

All living beings have received their weapons through the same process of evolution that moulded their impulses and inhibitions; for the structural plan of the body and the system of behaviour of a species are parts of the same whole…. Wordsworth is right: there is only one being in possession of weapons which do not grow on his body and of whose working plan, therefore, the instincts of his species know nothing and in the usage of which he has no correspondingly adequate inhibition.
 — Konrad Lorenz

[photo: Albert Watson, 1992]