If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.
B. F. SKINNERSomething doing every minute’ may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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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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Death does not trouble me. I have no fear of supernatural punishments, of course, nor could I enjoy an eternal life in which there would be nothing left for me to do, the task of living having been accomplished.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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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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Your liberals and radicals all want to govern. They want to try it their way- to show that people will be happier if the power is wielded in a different way or for different purposes. But how do they know? Have they ever tried it? No, it’s merely their guess.
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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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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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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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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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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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We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
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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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