Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
B. F. SKINNERTo say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
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Behavior is determined by its consequences.
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It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.
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…not everyone is willing to defend a position of ‘not knowing.’ There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.
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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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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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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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It is a surprising fact that those who object most violently to the manipulation of behaviour nevertheless make the most vigorous effort to manipulate minds.
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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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Men build society and society builds men.
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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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A 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.
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The alphabet was a great invention, which enabled men to store and to learn with little effort what others had learned the hard way-that is, to learn from books rather than from direct, possibly painful, contact with the real world.
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I will be dead in a few months. But it hasn’t given me the slightest anxiety or worry. I always knew I was going to die.
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A 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.
B. F. SKINNER