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.
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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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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We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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Except when physically restrained, a person is least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment, and unfortunately most people often are.
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A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he’s often sure he can find one. And that’s a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.
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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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At this very moment enormous numbers of intelligent men and women of goodwill are trying to build a better world. But problems are born faster than they can be solved.
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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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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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Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
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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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No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn’t die out, it’s wiped out.
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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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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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