John B. Watson Quotes & Sayings

The first aim of a good college is not to teach books, but the meaning and purpose of life. Hard study and the learning of books are only a means to this end. We develop power and courage and determination and we go out to achieve Truth, Wisdom and Justice. If we do not come to this, the cost of schooling is wasted. — John B. Watson

Psychology, as the behaviorist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs introspection as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics ... The position is taken here that the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered in the same plane. — John B. Watson

Men are built, not born ... Give me the baby, and I'll make it climb and use its hands in constructing buildings of stone or wood ... I'll make it a thief, a gunman or a dope fiend. The possibilities of shaping in any direction are almost endless ... — John B. Watson

The Behaviorist cannot find consciousness in the test-tube of his science. — John B. Watson

The behaviorist advances the view that what the psychologists have hitherto called thought is in short nothing but talking to ourselves. — John B. Watson

This dogma (the soul) has been present in human psychology from earliest antiquity. No one has ever touched the soul, or has seen one in a test tube, or has in any way come into a relationship with it as he has with the other objects of his daily experience. — John B. Watson

No one knows just how the idea of a soul or the supernatural started ... It probably had its origin in the general laziness of mankind. — John B. Watson

There are ... for us no instincts - we no longer need the term in psychology. Everything we have been in the habit of calling an 'instinct' today is a result largely of training - belonging to man's learned behavior. — John B. Watson