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. SKINNERA 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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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But restraint is the only one sort of control, and absence of restraint isn’t freedom. It’s not control that’s lacking when one feels ‘free’, but the objectionable control of force.
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What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
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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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In a world of complete economic equality, you get and keep the affections you deserve. You can’t buy love with gifts or favors, you can’t hold love by raising an inadequate child, and you can’t be secure in love by serving as a good scrub woman or a good provider.
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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.
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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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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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We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word ‘admire’ then means ‘marvel at.’
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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.
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Behavior is determined by its consequences.
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Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
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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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Except when physically restrained, a person is least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment, and unfortunately most people often are.
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Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.
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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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