"Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars…still make war against his brother?”
This line comes near the end of Taylor's typically ponderous and self-important bloviating as he speaks to no one but himself...and whoever might hear the recording that he is making before settling in for suspended animation. Although audiences won't realize it for another almost another two hours, it is as subtle a piece of foreshadowing as any found in 1960s cinema.
"You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you all to hell!”
Taylor, the self-important narcissist fully assured he has all the answers no matter what the question is finally forced to confront his own hubris like any tragic hero eventually must. One of the key aspects of Taylor’s prickly and highly unenticing personality is cocksure belief that he alone knows the full depths to which mankind is capable of devolving. He finds out that he is wrong. Terribly, horribly, tragically wrong. He also gets his answer to the question posed above in one of his first lines of dialogue here in his last line of dialogue.
“His destiny.”
Zaius says this cryptic line in response to Zira’s question about Taylor will find when he sets out from the Forbidden Zone in exploration of this strange planet where men are ruled by apes. What he finds is the decapitation head of the Statue of Liberty. What he finds is his destiny: he never so much as left the solar system—not for very long, anyway. He ended up right back where he started from only to find that—as far as men got—not a whole lot has really changed. At least, that is what Zaius would suggest was his destiny.
“Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape.”
These are the very first words spoken by a human that any living ape has heard. Some have suggested there is an implicit racism in the gorillas—the warriors of ape society—being the object of his ire, but that color of the fur of the particular apes seems wildly beside the point. In fact, the entire point is that while the apes may be significantly different but at heart Taylor is one thing above all else: a misanthropic hater of men. That is not enough, however: as he soon proves, he hates all primates. Would not matter if it were the darker-colored gorillas or the blond not-quite-Aryan orangutans to whom this quote was directed. Taylor thinks any humanoid creature walking on two feet and capable of higher thought is dirty and damned. Perhaps this insight into Taylor's personality is why THIS quote is the only one from the film to make it onto the AFI list of 100 memorable quotes despite a few others being slightly more famous and quotable.
Landon: "Okay, you read me well enough. But why can’t I read you?”
Taylor: “Don’t bother.”
Taylor does not mind going around telling anyone willing to put up with his stentorian pronouncements how they feel, what they think and why they do the things to do. But he, of course, is impenetrable. Pure enigma. Pure ego. If he hadn’t been an astronaut, Taylor might have become a CEO…or run for President.
“Look on the bright side. If this is the best they’ve got around here…in six months we’ll be running this planet.”
Once again, Taylor just cannot seem to help himself from thinking so highly of his own aptitude that he is going to have to face some very disturbing atonal music. The thinking here is applied to the mute and de-evolved state of humanity. He hasn’t yet met the best that the planet has to offer. The apes which gives it its name.
"Some apes, it seems, are more equal than others."
Taylor still cannot seem to grasp that that he is so very much like these half-evolved simians that he holds in the exact same contempt that he holds his fellow man back in his own time. Taylor would definitely be a tragic figure if he weren't so consistent in his hubris and inability to toss off those shackles of ignorance that he perversely views as placing him on a higher level of critical thinking. Taylor may well exhibit great critical thinking skills, but he manifests profoundly little contextual thinking skills. Everything is equal in his mind with only himself above all.
