A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
B. F. SKINNERIt has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student’s life.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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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Teachers must learn how to teach they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.
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Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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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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At this very moment enormous numbers of intelligent men and women of goodwill are trying to build a better world. But problems are born faster than they can be solved.
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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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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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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word ‘admire’ then means ‘marvel at.’
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I may say that the only differences I expect to see revealed between the behavior of the rat and man (aside from enormous differences of complexity) lie in the field of verbal behavior.
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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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That’s all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
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Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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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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What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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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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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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A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
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Going out of style isn’t a natural process, but a manipulated change which destroys the beauty of last year’s dress in order to make it worthless.
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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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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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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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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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