An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.
B. F. SKINNERA vast technology has been developed to prevent, reduce, or terminate exhausting labor and physical damage. It is now dedicated to the production of the most trivial conveniences and comfort.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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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What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
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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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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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It is a surprising fact that those who object most violently to the manipulation of behaviour nevertheless make the most vigorous effort to manipulate minds.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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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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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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That’s all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
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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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A first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
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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.
B. F. SKINNER







