Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
B. F. SKINNERThe major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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A first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
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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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I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
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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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Your liberals and radicals all want to govern. They want to try it their way- to show that people will be happier if the power is wielded in a different way or for different purposes. But how do they know? Have they ever tried it? No, it’s merely their guess.
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If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.
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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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I 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.
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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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Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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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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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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A child who has been severely punished for sex play is not necessarily less inclined to continue; and a man who has been imprisoned for violent assault is not necessarily less inclined toward violence.
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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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We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
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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 juvenile delinquent does not feel his disturbed personality. The intelligent man does not feel his intelligence or the introvert his introversion.
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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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Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
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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.
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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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What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
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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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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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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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