Except when physically restrained, a person is least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment, and unfortunately most people often are.
B. F. SKINNERA disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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.
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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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Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
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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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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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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.
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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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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
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Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
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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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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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We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement.
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We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
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Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
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