Konrad Lorenz Quotes

I fear … that morals do not of necessity advance hand in hand with the sciences.

We have changed our environment more quickly than we have learned how to change ourselves.

The history of empires is the record of human misery; the history of the sciences is that of the greatness and happiness of mankind.

Nature is a catchment of sorrows.

Forget politics. The real story is the advancements being made in medicine. We're on the verge of conquering cancer and Alzheimer's and numerous other diseases. The DNA revolution has just begun. Scientific advancement usually trumps politics.

In technological development, in production of material goods and creature comforts, we've challenged the very gods, but psychologically, emotionally, we're scarcely more than chimpanzees with bulldozers, baboons with big bombs.

This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.

No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world.

Be compassionate to everyone. Don't just search for whatever it is that annoys and frightens you-see beyond those things to the basic human being. Especially see the child in the man or woman. Even if they are destroying you, allow a moment to see how lost in their own delusion and suffering they are.

Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world's an orphan's home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communication.

People call me an optimist, but I'm really an appreciator ... years ago, I was cured of a badly infected finger with antibiotics when once my doctor could have recommended only a hot water soak or, eventually, surgery.... When I was six years old and had scarlet fever, the first of the miracle drugs, sulfanilamide, saved my life. I'm grateful for computers and photocopiers ... I appreciate where we've come from.

They build machines they can't control, and bury the waste in a great big hole.

I doubt that pornography has been good for the advancement of society, but I suspect it’s done wonders for the advancement of computer technology.

Our scientists all the more occupy advanced positions in the development of world science. By the example of their successes in the field of atomic energy, our scientists and technicians have vividly shown how much the increased might of the Soviet state and the further growth of its international authority depends on their efforts and practical successes.

Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous.

Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.

Man must be at once more humble and more confident; more humble in the face of destructive potentials of what he can achieve, more confident of his own humanity as against computers and robots which are only engines to simulate him.

New truths become evident when new tools become available.

These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.

Considering what human beings do and have done to human beings (and to other living things as well) ... I can never imagine what the devil people think computers can add to the horrors.

The world is devoted to physical science, because it believes theses discoveries will increase its capacity of luxury and self-indulgence. But the pursuit of science only leads to the insoluble.

A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerged, and will be able to discover the diamonds in the filth.

Nature, and the natural human condition, generates tremendous suffering. We have the means to overcome that, and we should deploy it.

The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with observation,--a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of God,--he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.

The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none left over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment.