A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
B. F. SKINNEREducation is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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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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Society already possesses the psychological techniques needed to obtain universal observance of a code – a code which would guarantee the success of a community or state. The difficulty is that these techniques are in the hands of the wrong people-or, rather, there aren’t any right people.
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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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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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Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
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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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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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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 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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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 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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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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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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Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.
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