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.
B. F. SKINNERThe one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us – here and now.
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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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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No 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.
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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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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Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
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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.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
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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.
B. F. SKINNER