When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
B. F. SKINNERThe real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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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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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Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
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Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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I may say that the only differences I expect to see revealed between the behavior of the rat and man (aside from enormous differences of complexity) lie in the field of verbal behavior.
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I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.
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We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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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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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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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 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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A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
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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