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.
B. F. SKINNERA permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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A 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.
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Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
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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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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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Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
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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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Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
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Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.
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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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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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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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We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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Men build society and society builds men.
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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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I’ve often said that my rats have taught me much more than I’ve taught them.
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Society already possesses the psychological techniques needed to obtain universal observance of a code – a code which would guarantee the success of a community or state. The difficulty is that these techniques are in the hands of the wrong people-or, rather, there aren’t any right people.
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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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The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
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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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If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.
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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 way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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