Konrad Lorenz Quotes
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Barking dogs occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot.
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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.
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From a neighbour, I got a one-day-old duckling and found, to my intense joy, that it transferred its following response to my person. At the same time, my interest became irreversibly fixated on water fowl, and I became an expert on their behaviour even as a child.
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I have found the missing link between the higher ape and civilized man; it is we.
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All too willingly man sees himself as the centre of the universe, as something not belonging to the rest of nature but standing apart as a different and higher being. Many people cling to this error and remain deaf to the wisest command ever given by a sage, the famous 'Know thyself' inscribed in the temple of Delphi.
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'I don't need brains,' says the billionaire contemptuously. 'I'm brainy enough myself!' The broker cries out in desperation, 'What, in heaven's name, do you want?' 'Goodness,' is the answer.
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It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.
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I believe that present day civilized man suffers from insufficient discharge of his aggressive drive.
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I grew up in the large house and the larger garden of my parents in Altenberg. They were supremely tolerant of my inordinate love for animals.
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The bond with a true dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth will ever be.
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I owe undying gratitude to my patient parents.
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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.
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When I was about ten, I discovered evolution by reading a book by Wilhelm Boelsche and seeing a picture of Archaeopteryx.
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The father-mother family with two children isolated in a city flat is already insufficient.
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All the advantages that man has gained from his ever-deepening understanding of the natural world that surrounds him, his technological, chemical and medical progress, all of which should seem to alleviate human suffering... tends instead to favor humanity's destruction.
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I consider early childhood events as most essential to a man's scientific and philosophical development.
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Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.
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Ethologists are often accused of drawing false analogies between animal and human behaviour. However, no such thing as a false analogy exists: an analogy can be more or less detailed and, hence, more or less informative.
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Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.
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Evil, by definition, is that which endangers the good, and the good is what we perceive as a value.
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We had better dispense with the personification of evil, because it leads, all too easily, to the most dangerous kind of war: religious war.
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We do not take humor seriously enough.
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There is indeed the possibility that the evolutionary process has, in gray antiquity, bred into us an excess of aggression.
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Whenever we find, in two forms of life that are unrelated to each other, a similarity of form or of behaviour patterns which relates to more than a few minor details, we assume it to be caused by parallel adaptation to the same life-preserving function.