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

"The universe will change if you bring up your children, not in the freedom of the libertine, but in behavioristic freedom."

- John B. Watson

"I would rather see the behavior of one white rat observed carefully from the moment of birth until death than to see a large volume of accurate statistical data on how 2,000 rats learned to open a puzzle box."

- John B. Watson

"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant chief and, yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors."

- 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

"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