A first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
B. F. SKINNERUnable 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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.
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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 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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Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.
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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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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.
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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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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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Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
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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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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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Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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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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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.
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