Explore Quotes by Konrad Lorenz

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man

Evil, by definition, is that which endangers the good, and the good is that which we perceive as a value.

I believe that present day civilized man suffers from insufficient discharge of his aggressive drive

The bond with a dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth can ever be.

If you confine yourself to this Skinnerian technique, you study nothing but the learning apparatus and you leave out everything that is different in octopi, crustaceans, insects and vertebrates. In other words, you leave out everything that makes a pigeon a pigeon, a rat a rat, a man a man, and, above all, a healthy man healthy and a sick man sick.

More than any other product of human scientific culture scientific knowledge is the collective property of all mankind.

Scientific truth is universal, because it is only discovered by the human brain and not made by it, as art is.

The scientist knows very well that he is approaching ultimate truth only in an asymptotic curve and is barred from ever reaching it; but at the same time he is proudly aware of being indeed able to determine whether a statement is a nearer or a less near approach to the truth.

The fidelity of a dog is a precious gift demanding no less binding moral responsibilities than the friendship of a human being.

In nature we find not only that which is expedient, but also everything which is not so inexpedient as to endanger the existence of the species.

Few animals display their mood via facial expressions as distinctly as cats.

All scientific knowledge to which man owes his role as master of the world arose from playful activities.

Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing.

I have found the missing link between the higher ape and civilized man; it is we.

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

Barking dogs may occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot!

Man appears to be the missing link between anthropoid apes and human beings.

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

Most people have forgotten how to live with living creatures, with living systems and that, in turn, is the reason why man, whenever he comes into contact with nature, threatens to kill the natural system in which and from which he live.

Man has been driven out of the paradise in which he could trust his instincts.