A child who has been severely punished for sex play is not necessarily less inclined to continue; and a man who has been imprisoned for violent assault is not necessarily less inclined toward violence.
B. F. SKINNERIt has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student’s life.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
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We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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Behavior is determined by its consequences.
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The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
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The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
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Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.
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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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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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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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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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The one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us – here and now.
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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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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 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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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
B. F. SKINNER







