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.
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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…not everyone is willing to defend a position of ‘not knowing.’ There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.
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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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If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.
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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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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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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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Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.
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To require a citizen to sign a loyalty oath is to destroy some of the loyalty he could otherwise claim, since any subsequent loyal behavior may then be attributed to the oath.
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Going out of style isn’t a natural process, but a manipulated change which destroys the beauty of last year’s dress in order to make it worthless.
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Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
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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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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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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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We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
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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.
B. F. SKINNER