August 18, 1961

Billings Learned Hand (January 27, 1872 to August 18, 1961) was named after members of his mother's family. His success as a lawyer reflects a family tradition in that profession. In his career he ultimately became a judge on US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. From that lofty post Judge Hand  burnished a reputation for insight and eloquence.

There is evidence of these qualities in our quote:

...[W]hen on occasion I visit my simian cousins in captivity the spectacle does not refresh me....their restlessness affects me with a homeopathic uneasiness....I wince that we have so many familiy traits in common....My kinship with them becomes even more distasteful when I pass to the cages of the great cats, who lie there serenely with their steady yellow eyes, calm, self-secure, fearing nothing. Why must my cousins and I be so agitated; why this ceaseless errant curiosity; passing only for an instant , and then off to something new? It is all very trying, and yet here will I pitch my tent.

James Harvery Robinson used to say we arose from the ape because like him we kept "monkeying around, "always meddling with everything around us. ...My thesis is that any organization of society which depresses free and spontaneous meddling is on the decline....

His quote reflects fresh thinking, if not much intuition into the sadness of captivity. We owe this quote to Practical Cogitator: Or the Thinker's Anthology (1945), a volume edited by Charles Curtis and ‎Ferris Greenslet.