When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
B. F. SKINNERTwenty-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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
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Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
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An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.
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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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Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
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We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
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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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A first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
B. F. SKINNER -
Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
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Men build society and society builds men.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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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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Teachers must learn how to teach they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.
B. F. SKINNER