“Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.”

Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.

A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.

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.

Behavior is determined by its consequences.

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.

Teachers must learn how to teach they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.

But restraint is the only one sort of control, and absence of restraint isn’t freedom. It’s not control that’s lacking when one feels ‘free’, but the objectionable control of force.

Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.

Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.

We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.

Those who have had anything useful to say have said it far too often, and those who have had nothing to say have been no more reticent.

If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.

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.

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.

The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.

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.

I think my idea of a perfect romance is when two people really belong to each other.

The day you catch an idea you fall in love with, even a small one, is a beautiful day.

It’s really scary or it’s easy to generate fear around an idea or around an -ism when you don’t provide any substance to it.

Democrats are a big-tent party. You know, I’m not trying to impose an ideology on all, you know, several hundred members of Congress.

God likes His people to believe that there is nothing too hard for Him…We are all the time limiting God’s power by our own ideas. Let us get our eyes off one another and fix them upon God. There is nothing to hard for Him.

Everybody has a different idea of love. One girl I know said, “I knew he loved me when de didn’t come in my mouth.

When the ideas are coming, I don’t stop until the ideas stop because that train doesn’t come along all the time.

I think sometimes people need to get used to an idea.