Science Quote by Dian Fossey

There is a bracing insult buried in Fossey's praise of gorillas: the animals aren’t being romanticized so much as humans are being indicted. “Comfortable” is not just personal preference here; it’s a survival strategy forged in the field, where predictability can mean the difference between trust and danger. Her claim that she can “anticipate” a gorilla reframes intelligence as legibility. Gorillas, in her telling, aren’t saints. They’re readable. People, by implication, are the species that lies.

The loaded phrase is “purely motivated.” Fossey isn’t arguing that gorillas are simple; she’s arguing they’re uncorrupted by status games. Hunger, protection, curiosity, social bonds: motives you can map. Human motives arrive disguised as policy, philanthropy, science, even love. In the Rwanda and Congo region where Fossey worked, the threats to gorillas weren’t abstract: poaching, habitat loss, black-market economics, and political indifference. Human behavior was not only violent but narratively slippery, rationalized with excuses and bureaucracy.

The subtext also reveals something about Fossey’s own moral posture. She cast herself as advocate, guardian, sometimes vigilante, and this line sharpens that self-myth: the honest animal versus the compromised human world. It works because it’s both an observational field note and a cultural accusation. The sentence flatters the gorillas, yes, but it’s really a diagnostic of how modern power operates: through mixed motives, hidden incentives, and the kind of “civilization” that makes brutality harder to name.