The one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us – here and now.
B. F. SKINNERI 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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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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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I will be dead in a few months. But it hasn’t given me the slightest anxiety or worry. I always knew I was going to die.
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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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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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I’ve often said that my rats have taught me much more than I’ve taught them.
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The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
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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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We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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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.
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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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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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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.
B. F. SKINNER