Ok, here's an old one:
"We simply must have clean butts. If we do not have clean butts, what separates us from common chimpanzees?"
That, of course, is from the ever-classy Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The clean butts thing makes perfect sense, because Jackie O. was just that kind of lady—if you hadn't already heard the quote, you could have guessed that part word for word, I'm sure—but what a lot of people gloss over when they read this is the woman's disdain for "common chimpanzees."
Indeed, disdain hardly seems to cover it. Jackie O. hated chimps. No one is exactly sure why. By all accounts, Jackie never even saw a chimpanzee, not in person or on film, until she was an adult, and when she finally did it was like the light in one bright corner of her soul was turned off. The closest she ever came to explaining her sentiments was at a White House function in 1962, when she drunkenly told a Tanzanian diplomat, "I hate [chimps]. They remind me of trolls. I hate trolls. You know that. Everyone knows that!"
Perhaps most surprising was the revelation that she repeatedly attempted to have Jane Goodall killed throughout the 60s and 70s. After examining a Onassis' lifetime correspondence in 1995, a biographer claimed that the letters contained "hundreds" of references to "that troll-loving bitch," and that Onassis felt her assassination contracts would have been successful, had Goodall's chimpanzee subjects not proven so adept at "soaking up bullets."
Anyway, it's an interesting side to such a (supposedly) well-known character. Quotes quotes quotes. Got to love them.
PS—If anyone gets sassy about the title of this post ("But humans are great apes, so..."), I swear to god I will make them regret it.
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