Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
B. F. SKINNERWhen we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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Behavior is determined by its consequences.
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The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
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The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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Something doing every minute’ may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.
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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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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 real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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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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