A vast technology has been developed to prevent, reduce, or terminate exhausting labor and physical damage. It is now dedicated to the production of the most trivial conveniences and comfort.
B. F. SKINNERA fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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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We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
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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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Death does not trouble me. I have no fear of supernatural punishments, of course, nor could I enjoy an eternal life in which there would be nothing left for me to do, the task of living having been accomplished.
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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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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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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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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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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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Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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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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The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.
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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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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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Something doing every minute’ may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.
B. F. SKINNER