The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
B. F. SKINNERA 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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.
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We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.
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Men build society and society builds men.
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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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The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.
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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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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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To 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.
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The problem of far greater importance remains to be solved. Rather than build a world in which we shall all live well, we must stop building one in which it will be impossible to live at all.
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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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…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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A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
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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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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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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.
B. F. SKINNER







