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.
B. F. SKINNERThe mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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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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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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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We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
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What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
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If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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To require a citizen to sign a loyalty oath is to destroy some of the loyalty he could otherwise claim, since any subsequent loyal behavior may then be attributed to the oath.
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We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
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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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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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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 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.
B. F. SKINNER







