Something doing every minute’ may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.
B. F. SKINNERSociety 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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
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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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A vast technology has been developed to prevent, reduce, or terminate exhausting labor and physical damage. It is now dedicated to the production of the most trivial conveniences and comfort.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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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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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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Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
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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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What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
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A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
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The alphabet was a great invention, which enabled men to store and to learn with little effort what others had learned the hard way-that is, to learn from books rather than from direct, possibly painful, contact with the real world.
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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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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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Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
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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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We 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.
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The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.
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If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.
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We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
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Those who have had anything useful to say have said it far too often, and those who have had nothing to say have been no more reticent.
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Men build society and society builds men.
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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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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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It is a surprising fact that those who object most violently to the manipulation of behaviour nevertheless make the most vigorous effort to manipulate minds.
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We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement.
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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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