The simulated approval and affection with which parents and teachers are often urged to solve behavior problems are counterfeit. So are flattery, backslap-ping, and many other ways of “winning friends.
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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Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?
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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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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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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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We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.
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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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If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
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I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.
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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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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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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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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 the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.
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I may say that the only differences I expect to see revealed between the behavior of the rat and man (aside from enormous differences of complexity) lie in the field of verbal behavior.
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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 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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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.
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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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The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.
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Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
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A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process.
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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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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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