The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
B. F. SKINNERA 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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.
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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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I’ve often said that my rats have taught me much more than I’ve taught them.
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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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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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We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
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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 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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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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In a world of complete economic equality, you get and keep the affections you deserve. You can’t buy love with gifts or favors, you can’t hold love by raising an inadequate child, and you can’t be secure in love by serving as a good scrub woman or a good provider.
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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.
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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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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 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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Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.
B. F. SKINNER