“The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.”

Going 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.

Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.

We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

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.

America has but one main problem — the character of the men and women it shall produce.

Do not bandy words with your father, nor treat him as a dotard, nor reproach the old man, who has cherished you, with his age.

The man who has planned badly, if fortune is on his side, may have had a stroke of luck; but his plan was a bad one nonetheless.

Before a man dies, hold back and call him not happy but lucky.

Adversity has the effect of drawing out strength and qualities of a man that would have laid dormant in its absence.

A man of bad character punishes his own soul.

Whatever comes from God is impossible for a man to turn back.

Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source — next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth.