“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.”

We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.

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.

If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.

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.

The one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us – here and now.

The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.

I’ve often said that my rats have taught me much more than I’ve taught them.

Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.

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.

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.

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.

Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least.

If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.

No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn’t die out, it’s wiped out.

Except when physically restrained, a person is least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment, and unfortunately most people often are.

Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?

You cannot solve a problem until you acknowledge that you have one and accept responsibility for solving it.

Anyone who can solve the problems of water will be worthy of two Nobel prizes – one for peace and one for science.

One problem with our current society is that we have an attitude towards education.

So we find that the three possible solutions of the great problem of increasing human energy are answered by the three words: food, peace, work.

One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance.

To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is.

I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.

Smiling is the best way to face every problem, to crush every fear, to hide every pain.