Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
B. F. SKINNERI 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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
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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 a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.
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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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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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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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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 child who has been severely punished for sex play is not necessarily less inclined to continue; and a man who has been imprisoned for violent assault is not necessarily less inclined toward violence.
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Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.
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We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
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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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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 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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We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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