The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
B. F. SKINNERNo 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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.
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At this very moment enormous numbers of intelligent men and women of goodwill are trying to build a better world. But problems are born faster than they can be solved.
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Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
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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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What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
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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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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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The 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.
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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 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 not yet seen what man can make of man.
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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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We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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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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Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.
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