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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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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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 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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The simplest and most satisfactory view is that thought is simply behavior – verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt. It is not some mysterious process responsible for behavior but the very behavior itself in all the complexity of its controlling relations.
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We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
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I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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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.
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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 shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
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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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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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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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Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
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