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.
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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If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.
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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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No 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.
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Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.
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Behavior is determined by its consequences.
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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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Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.
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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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Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
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It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student’s life.
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Something doing every minute’ may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.
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The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
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It is a surprising fact that those who object most violently to the manipulation of behaviour nevertheless make the most vigorous effort to manipulate minds.
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The problem of far greater importance remains to be solved. Rather than build a world in which we shall all live well, we must stop building one in which it will be impossible to live at all.
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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.
B. F. SKINNER







