Something doing every minute’ may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.
B. F. SKINNEREducation is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
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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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Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least.
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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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Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
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Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.
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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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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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We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word ‘admire’ then means ‘marvel at.’
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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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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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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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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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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 did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.
B. F. SKINNER