A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
B. F. SKINNERChaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
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I’ve often said that my rats have taught me much more than I’ve taught them.
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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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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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The problem of far greater importance remains to be solved. Rather than build a world in which we shall all live well, we must stop building one in which it will be impossible to live at all.
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Behavior is determined by its consequences.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
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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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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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Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.
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I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
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Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
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Something doing every minute’ may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.
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Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.
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We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
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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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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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The juvenile delinquent does not feel his disturbed personality. The intelligent man does not feel his intelligence or the introvert his introversion.
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At this very moment enormous numbers of intelligent men and women of goodwill are trying to build a better world. But problems are born faster than they can be solved.
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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 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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A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he’s often sure he can find one. And that’s a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.
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The one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us – here and now.
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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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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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