I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
B. F. SKINNERA 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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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 is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.
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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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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
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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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Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
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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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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 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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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 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.
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Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.
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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.
B. F. SKINNER