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.
B. F. SKINNERIt 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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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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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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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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That’s all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
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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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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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We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
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The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
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Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.
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Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.
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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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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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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.
B. F. SKINNER