Ethologist Konrad Quotes

The cat is a wild animal that inhabits the homes of humans. ~ Konrad Lorenz

I do not ask to be young again; all I want is to go on getting older. ~ Konrad Adenauer

It's almost funny, isn't it?"
"What is?"
"How some animals are worth more than others?"
"Well," he handed Konrad a sugar cube from a tin on the shelf. "It isn't just the animal; it's the type of animal."
"Color, shape, size? If people pay for an animal based on what it looks like, what does that say about them?"
"It isn't necessarily what they look like." He frowned. "It's about where they come from."
"That's silly," she said. ~ Amanda Lance

So you are the scribes that nobody and everybody is talking about," Konrad said.
"I don't know about that," Malachi said. "I'm not much for gossip."
"Oh, we eminent politicians don't call it gossip, Malachi. We call it 'intelligence. ~ Elizabeth Hunter

These 'anthropologists of peace' (who in fact are rather aggressive academics - the ethologist Johan van der Dennen calls them the Peace and Harmony Mafia. ~ Steven Pinker

Philosophers are people who know less and less about more and more, until they know nothing about everything. Scientists are people who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing. ~ Konrad Lorenz

Visualize yourself confronted with the task of killing, one after the other, a cabbage, a fly, a fish, a lizard, a guinea pig, a cat, a dog, a monkey and a baby chimpanzee. In the unlikely case that you should experience no greater inhibitions in killing the chimpanzee than in destroying the cabbage or the fly, my advice to you is to commit suicide at your earliest possible convenience, because you are a weird monstrosity and a public danger. ~ Konrad Lorenz

Best of all is it to preserve everything in a pure, still heart, and let there be for every pulse a thanksgiving, and for every breath a song. ~ Konrad Von Gesner

Experiences are the seeds out of which wisdom grows. ~ Konrad Adenauer

Thoughts and pictures come to my mind, ... thoughts from before the year 1914 when there was real peace, quiet and security on this earth-a time when we didn't know fear ... Security and quiet have disappeared from the lives of men since 1914. ~ Konrad Adenauer

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. ~ Konrad Lorenz

Barking dogs occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot. ~ Konrad Lorenz

It must be the duty of racial hygiene to be attentive to a more severe elimination of morally inferior human beings than is the case today ... We should literally replace all factors responsible for selection in a natural and free life ... In prehistoric times of humanity, selection for endurance, heroism, social usefulness, etc. was made solely by hostile outside factors. This role must be assumed by a human organization; otherwise, humanity will, for lack of selective factors, be annihilated by the degenerative phenomena that accompany domestication. ~ Konrad Lorenz

Yes, we were amazed when that happened. It was a real joke to us. Konrad Lueg and I did a Happening, and we used the phrase just for the Happening, to have a catchy name for it; and then it immediately got taken up and brought into use. There's no defence against that - and really it's no bad thing. ~ Gerhard Richter

Since my first discussions of ecological problems with Professor John Day around 1950 and since reading Konrad Lorenz's "King Solomon's Ring," I have become increasingly interested in the study of animals for what they might teach us about man, and the study of man as an animal. I have become increasingly disenchanted with what the thinkers of the so-called Age of Enlightenment tell us about the nature of man, and with what the formal religions and doctrinaire political theorists tell us about the same subject. ~ Allan McLeod Cormack

The competition between human beings destroys with cold and diabolic brutality ... Under the pressure of this competitive fury we have not only forgotten what is useful to humanity as a whole, but even that which is good and advantageous to the individual. [ ... ] One asks, which is more damaging to modern humanity: the thirst for money or consuming haste ... in either case, fear plays a very important role: the fear of being overtaken by one's competitors, the fear of becoming poor, the fear of making wrong decisions or the fear of not being up to snuff ... ~ Konrad Lorenz

If Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, Cracow, Warsaw, and Berlin belong to Europe, then why not Leningrad, why not Moscow--indeed, why stop before Vladivostok? It is all part of Eurasia, there is no state frontier between...I would like to think of myself as some utopian son of Europe, able to touch the Pacific at San Francisco with one outstretched arm and at Vladivostok with the other, and keeping the peace everywhere within my embrace. ~ George Konrad

the little steel retaining pin that locks down the ~ Konrad R.K. Ludwig

All human organs eventually tire, only the tongue doesn't. ~ Konrad Adenauer

I believe that both art and the human striving for cognitive comprehension are manifest forms of the grand game in which nothing more is stipulated than the game's rules; both art and actively solicited perceptions are but special cases of the recurring creative act to which we owe our existence. ~ Konrad Lorenz

I originally came from Dresden, where Socialist Realism prevailed. Konrad Lueg and I came up with it, for the most part ironically, since I now live in capitalism. It was certainly 'realism', but in another form - the capitalist form, as it were. It wasn't meant that seriously. It was more a slogan for that particular Happening at a furniture store. ~ Gerhard Richter

That was a piece I did in 1963 with Konrad Lueg in a department store, in the furniture department. It was announced in some papers as an exhibition opening, but the people who came didn't know that it was to be a sort of Happening. I don't think it is quite right that it has become so famous anyhow. It was just a lot of fun, and the word itself, Capitalist Realism, hit just right. But it wasn't such a big deal. ~ Gerhard Richter

The attitude of the true scientist towards the real limits of human understanding was unforgettably impressed on me in early youth by the obviously unpremeditated words of a great biologist; Alfred Kuhn finished a lecture to the Austrian Academy of Science with Goethe 's words, "It is the greatest joy of the man of thought to have explored the explorable and then calmly to revere the inexplorable." After the last word he hesitated, raised his hand in repudiation and cried, above the applause, "No, not calmly, gentlemen; not calmly ! ~ Konrad Lorenz

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

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

In the almost film-like flitting-by of modern life, a man needs something to tell him, from time to time, that he is still himself, and nothing can give him this assurance in so comforting a manner as the "four feet trotting behind". ~ Konrad Lorenz

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. ~ Konrad Lorenz

All that the socialists understand about money is the fact that they want it from others. ~ Konrad Adenauer

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

God designed the stomach to eject what is bad for it, but not the human brain. ~ Konrad Adenauer

I believe that present day civilized man suffers from insufficient discharge of his aggressive drive. ~ Konrad Lorenz

To look back into the past only makes sense if it serves the future. ~ Konrad Adenauer

The missing link between animals and the real human being is most likely ourselves. ~ Konrad Lorenz

You're like something drawn with the sun's fire, and I can take only little glimpses of you. ~ Kenneth Oppel