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.
B. F. SKINNERThe 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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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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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I’ve often said that my rats have taught me much more than I’ve taught them.
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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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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 one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us – here and now.
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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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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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We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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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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The simplest and most satisfactory view is that thought is simply behavior – verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt. It is not some mysterious process responsible for behavior but the very behavior itself in all the complexity of its controlling relations.
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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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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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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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