Konrad Lorenz - On Aggression (1963)

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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.

Konrad Lorenz
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.

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

Konrad Lorenz
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.

Konrad Lorenz
I am convinced that of all the people on the two sides of the great curtain, the space pilots are the least likely to hate each other. Like the late Erich von Holst, I believe that the tremendous and otherwise not quite explicable public interest in space flight arises from the subconscious realization that it helps to preserve peace. May it continue to do so!

Konrad Lorenz
The rushed existence into which industrialized, commercialized man has precipitated himself is actually a good example of an inexpedient development caused entirely by competition between members of the same species. Human beings of today are attacked by so-called manager diseases, high blood pressure, renal atrophy, gastric ulcers, and torturing neuroses: they succumb to barbarism because they have no more time for cultural interests.

Konrad Lorenz
The instinctive need to be the member of a closely knit group fighting for common ideals may grow so strong that it becomes inessential what these ideals are.

Konrad Lorenz
We had better dispense with the personification of evil, because it leads, all too easily, to the most dangerous kind of war: religious war.

Konrad Lorenz
A man sufficiently gifted with humor is in small danger of succumbing to flattering delusions about himself, because he cannot help perceiving what a pompous ass he would become if he did.

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

Konrad Lorenz
The scientist who considers himself absolutely "objective" and believes that he can free himself from the compulsion of the "merely" subjective should try — only in imagination of course — to kill in succession a lettuce, a fly, a frog, a guineapig, a cat, a dog, and finally a chimpanzee. He will then be aware how increasingly difficult murder becomes as the victim's level of organisation rises. The degree of inhibition against killing each one of these beings is a very precise measure for the considerably different values that we cannot help attributing to lower and higher forms of life. To any man who finds it equally easy to chop up a live dog and a live lettuce I would recommend suicide at his earliest convenience!

Konrad Lorenz
Let us imagine that an absolutely unbiased investigator on another planet, perhaps on Mars, is examining human behavior on earth, with the aid of a telescope whose magnification is too small to enable him to discern individuals and follow their separate behavior, but large enough for him to observe occurrences such as migrations of peoples, wars, and similar great historical events. He would never gain the impression that human behavior was dictated by intelligence, still less by responsible morality.

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

Konrad Lorenz
Nothing can better express the feelings of the scientist towards the great unity of the laws of nature than in Immanuel Kant's words: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing awe: the stars above me and the moral law within me."… Would he, who did not yet know of the evolution of the world of organisms, be shocked that we consider the moral law within us not as something given, a priori, but as something which has arisen by natural evolution, just like the laws of the heavens?

Konrad Lorenz
The neuro-physiological organization which we call instinct functions in a blindly mechanical way, particularly apparent when its function goes wrong.

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
I now come to the third great obstacle to human self-knowledge, to the belief — deeply rooted in our western culture — that what can be explained in terms of natural science has no values. This belief springs from an exaggeration of Kant's values-philosophy, the consequence of the idealistic dichotomy of the world into the external world of things and the internal laws of human reason.

Konrad Lorenz
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.

Konrad Lorenz
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.

Konrad Lorenz
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