To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
B. F. SKINNERWe have not yet seen what man can make of man.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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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Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
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The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
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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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I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.
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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.
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Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
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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.
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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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I may say that the only differences I expect to see revealed between the behavior of the rat and man (aside from enormous differences of complexity) lie in the field of verbal behavior.
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A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
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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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A person’s genetic endowment, a product of the evolution of the species, is said to explain part of the workings of his mind and his personal history the rest.
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Teachers must learn how to teach they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.
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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.
B. F. SKINNER







