The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
B. F. SKINNERNo one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn’t die out, it’s wiped out.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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Those who have had anything useful to say have said it far too often, and those who have had nothing to say have been no more reticent.
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The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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The simplest and most satisfactory view is that thought is simply behavior – verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt. It is not some mysterious process responsible for behavior but the very behavior itself in all the complexity of its controlling relations.
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A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
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Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least.
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I will be dead in a few months. But it hasn’t given me the slightest anxiety or worry. I always knew I was going to die.
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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
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A person’s genetic endowment, a product of the evolution of the species, is said to explain part of the workings of his mind and his personal history the rest.
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I’ve often said that my rats have taught me much more than I’ve taught them.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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To require a citizen to sign a loyalty oath is to destroy some of the loyalty he could otherwise claim, since any subsequent loyal behavior may then be attributed to the oath.
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Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.
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If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.
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