John B. Watson

"Psychology as I see it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior; and its practical goal is to help men and women."

"The behaviorist refuses to see any dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist's total scheme of investigation."

"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."

"There is no such thing as an inheritance of capacity, talent, temperament, mental constitution and characteristics. These things again depend on training that goes on in the early years."

"Fear of the dark, of solitude, of strange objects, just mentioned, are practically all that we can very definitely call innate emotional responses."

"The human being from the moment of birth is a solution of stimulus and response."

"I should like to go one step further now and say, 'Give me a baby and I'll shape him into anything.'"

"Every activity of man is a habit and most of these habits are bad ones."

"Anger is an emotional response that can be conditioned just like any other response."

"The world of the behaviorist is a world of stimuli and responses, of habit formation, of the conditioned reflex."

"Behaviorism, on the other hand, holds that actually all of this realm of psychics is just so much myth and symbolism."

"The behaviorist is interested in the body as a machine which can be investigated in terms of physics and chemistry."

"I once heard someone say that success is like a ladder that you climb rung by rung."

"The psychology of the early Freudians was far too introspective."

"Give me control of the media and I will control the mind."

"There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right."

"The great revolution in psychology came when we finally began to understand that behavior is measurable and observable."

"Psychology should study actual behavior, not the introspections of consciousness."

"I am trying to dethrone consciousness. It has ruled too long as a puppet master."

"Environmental factors shape every aspect of who we become."

"The mind is not a mysterious entity; it is simply the sum of our behavioral patterns."

"Education is the most powerful tool for shaping future generations."

"We are products of our conditioning, not our inheritance."

"Habits are formed through repetition and reinforcement."

"The objective study of behavior is the only valid approach to understanding human nature."

"Emotion is just a set of learned responses to environmental stimuli."

"There is no mind separate from the body; there is only behavior."

"We must observe what people do, not what they say they do."

"The key to changing behavior is to change the stimuli that produce it."

"All learning is nothing more than the acquisition of new behavioral patterns."