Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
B. F. SKINNERWe admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word ‘admire’ then means ‘marvel at.’
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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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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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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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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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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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But restraint is the only one sort of control, and absence of restraint isn’t freedom. It’s not control that’s lacking when one feels ‘free’, but the objectionable control of force.
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Those who have had anything useful to say have said it far too often, and those who have had nothing to say have been no more reticent.
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Going out of style isn’t a natural process, but a manipulated change which destroys the beauty of last year’s dress in order to make it worthless.
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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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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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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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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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…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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Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.
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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.
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