Men build society and society builds men.
B. F. SKINNERTo 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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
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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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Behavior is determined by its consequences.
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Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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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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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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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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…not everyone is willing to defend a position of ‘not knowing.’ There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.
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Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.
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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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The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
B. F. SKINNER