Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
B. F. SKINNER…not everyone is willing to defend a position of ‘not knowing.’ There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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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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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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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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I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
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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.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.
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The alphabet was a great invention, which enabled men to store and to learn with little effort what others had learned the hard way-that is, to learn from books rather than from direct, possibly painful, contact with the real world.
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What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
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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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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 admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word ‘admire’ then means ‘marvel at.’
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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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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Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
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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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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 permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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It is a surprising fact that those who object most violently to the manipulation of behaviour nevertheless make the most vigorous effort to manipulate minds.
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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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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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Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
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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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We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
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No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn’t die out, it’s wiped out.
B. F. SKINNER