“Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.”

A child who has been severely punished for sex play is not necessarily less inclined to continue; and a man who has been imprisoned for violent assault is not necessarily less inclined toward violence.

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.

Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.

A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.

The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.

Behavior is determined by its consequences.

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.

Teachers must learn how to teach they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.

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.

Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.

Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.

We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.

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.

If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.

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.

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.

The only sure way to avoid making mistakes is to have no new ideas.

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

Paris is always a good idea.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

Read absolutely everything you get your hands on because you’ll never know where you’ll get an idea from.

Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.

The reason I collect good ideas is because plots themselves are very difficult indeed to come by.

My idea of a true feminist is a woman who feels free enough to do whatever she wants.