A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
B. F. SKINNERDo not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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Teachers must learn how to teach they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.
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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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I’ve often said that my rats have taught me much more than I’ve taught them.
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I may say that the only differences I expect to see revealed between the behavior of the rat and man (aside from enormous differences of complexity) lie in the field of verbal behavior.
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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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We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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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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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 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 real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
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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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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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Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.
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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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A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
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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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The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.
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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.
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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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A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
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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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A vast technology has been developed to prevent, reduce, or terminate exhausting labor and physical damage. It is now dedicated to the production of the most trivial conveniences and comfort.
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