The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.
B. F. SKINNERA first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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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Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
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Your liberals and radicals all want to govern. They want to try it their way- to show that people will be happier if the power is wielded in a different way or for different purposes. But how do they know? Have they ever tried it? No, it’s merely their guess.
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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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A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
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That’s all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
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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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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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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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Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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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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It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student’s life.
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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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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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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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