The one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us – here and now.
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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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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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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Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.
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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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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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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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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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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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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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Behavior is determined by its consequences.
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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 piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
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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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Something doing every minute’ may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.
B. F. SKINNER