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.
B. F. SKINNERA permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.
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Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
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Behavior is determined by its consequences.
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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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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 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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The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.
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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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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he’s often sure he can find one. And that’s a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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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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A person’s genetic endowment, a product of the evolution of the species, is said to explain part of the workings of his mind and his personal history the rest.
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Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.
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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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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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A disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.
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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 real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.
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The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
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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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A person’s genetic endowment, a product of the evolution of the species, is said to explain part of the workings of his mind and his personal history the rest.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?
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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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