The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
B. F. SKINNERI will be dead in a few months. But it hasn’t given me the slightest anxiety or worry. I always knew I was going to die.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.
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…not everyone is willing to defend a position of ‘not knowing.’ There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.
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I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
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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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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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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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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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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 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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Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
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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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Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.
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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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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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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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Except when physically restrained, a person is least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment, and unfortunately most people often are.
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I will be dead in a few months. But it hasn’t given me the slightest anxiety or worry. I always knew I was going to die.
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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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Those who have had anything useful to say have said it far too often, and those who have had nothing to say have been no more reticent.
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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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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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Men build society and society builds men.
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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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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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