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.
B. F. SKINNERChaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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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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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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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Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.
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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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The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.
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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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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
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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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We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
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The simplest and most satisfactory view is that thought is simply behavior – verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt. It is not some mysterious process responsible for behavior but the very behavior itself in all the complexity of its controlling relations.
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We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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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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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.
B. F. SKINNER