Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.
B. F. SKINNERIt is not a question of starting. The start has been made. It’s a question of what’s to be done from now on.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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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Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
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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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What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
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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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That’s all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
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If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.
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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
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To require a citizen to sign a loyalty oath is to destroy some of the loyalty he could otherwise claim, since any subsequent loyal behavior may then be attributed to the oath.
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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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The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.
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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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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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Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.
B. F. SKINNER







