We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
B. F. SKINNERWe shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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A disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.
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Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least.
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Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
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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 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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The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
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The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
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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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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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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.
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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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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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We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
B. F. SKINNER