A disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.
B. F. SKINNERTwenty-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.
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 one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us – here and now.
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We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement.
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The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.
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A disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.
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A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
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The juvenile delinquent does not feel his disturbed personality. The intelligent man does not feel his intelligence or the introvert his introversion.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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A first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
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Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?
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I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
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Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.
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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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It is not a question of starting. The start has been made. It’s a question of what’s to be done from now on.
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It is not a question of starting. The start has been made. It’s a question of what’s to be done from now on.
B. F. SKINNER