Konrad Lorenz Quotations

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

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

Natural selection does not give any preference at all to anything that, in the long run, could be advantageous for the species but blindly rewards everything that, momentarily, affords greater procreative success.

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

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

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.

I would rather have a Scot come from Scotland togovern the people of this kingdom well and justly, than that you should govern them ill in the sight of all the world.

Hatred of humanity and love of animals make a very bad combination.

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.

Every mutation through a new combination of genetic factors that provides the organism with a new opportunity for coming to terms with the conditions of its environment signifies no more and no less than that new information about this environment has got into that organic system. Adaptation is essentially a cognitive process.