“Something doing every minute’ may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.”

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.

If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.

The simulated approval and affection with which parents and teachers are often urged to solve behavior problems are counterfeit. So are flattery, backslap-ping, and many other ways of “winning friends.

The one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us – here and now.

The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.

I’ve often said that my rats have taught me much more than I’ve taught them.

Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Except when physically restrained, a person is least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment, and unfortunately most people often are.

Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. But many others were also in the same place. The difference was that I took action.

We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

The weakest man is the one who is able to correct his moral defects, but doesn’t take action.

Poetry is an act of peace.

We must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed toward attaining it.

Love is cheering and sharing and compassion and giving and receiving. Love is an action thing more than a word thing, that brings comfort or joy or relief to anyone or anything.

We are born to action; and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.

Anything lost, can be found again, except for time wasted. A vision without action is merely a dream. Action, it’s the grind, it’s the hustle, it’s the persistence.