John B. Watson Quotes

#1. The behaviorist advances the view that what the psychologists have hitherto called thought is in short nothing but talking to ourselves.

John B. Watson

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. The Behaviorist cannot find consciousness in the test-tube of his science.

John B. Watson

#6. 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