The simulated approval and affection with which parents and teachers are often urged to solve behavior problems are counterfeit. So are flattery, backslap-ping, and many other ways of “winning friends.
B. F. SKINNEROld age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.
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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.
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Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.
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We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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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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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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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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It is not a question of starting. The start has been made. It’s a question of what’s to be done from now on.
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Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.
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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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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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Teachers must learn how to teach they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.
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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.
B. F. SKINNER







