Konrad Lorenz Quotes about Science

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

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

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

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.