Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
B. F. SKINNERA permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
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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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Society already possesses the psychological techniques needed to obtain universal observance of a code – a code which would guarantee the success of a community or state. The difficulty is that these techniques are in the hands of the wrong people-or, rather, there aren’t any right people.
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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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If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.
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At this very moment enormous numbers of intelligent men and women of goodwill are trying to build a better world. But problems are born faster than they can be solved.
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A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
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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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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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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.
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Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
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Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?
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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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Those who have had anything useful to say have said it far too often, and those who have had nothing to say have been no more reticent.
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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.
B. F. SKINNER