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.
B. F. SKINNERI don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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 mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.
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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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Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
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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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Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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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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Men build society and society builds men.
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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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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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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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We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.
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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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But restraint is the only one sort of control, and absence of restraint isn’t freedom. It’s not control that’s lacking when one feels ‘free’, but the objectionable control of force.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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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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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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I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.
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A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
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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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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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Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.
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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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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
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