Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
B. F. SKINNERGoing out of style isn’t a natural process, but a manipulated change which destroys the beauty of last year’s dress in order to make it worthless.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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 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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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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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 real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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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.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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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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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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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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Except when physically restrained, a person is least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment, and unfortunately most people often are.
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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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Men build society and society builds men.
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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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An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.
B. F. SKINNER