I’ve often said that my rats have taught me much more than I’ve taught them.
B. F. SKINNERScience, 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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
-
-
Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
B. F. SKINNER -
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.
B. F. SKINNER -
Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.
B. F. SKINNER -
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. SKINNER -
I will be dead in a few months. But it hasn’t given me the slightest anxiety or worry. I always knew I was going to die.
B. F. SKINNER -
The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
B. F. SKINNER -
Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
B. F. SKINNER -
Except when physically restrained, a person is least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment, and unfortunately most people often are.
B. F. SKINNER -
It is not a question of starting. The start has been made. It’s a question of what’s to be done from now on.
B. F. SKINNER -
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
B. F. SKINNER -
Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?
B. F. SKINNER -
A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
B. F. SKINNER -
Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
B. F. SKINNER -
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.
B. F. SKINNER -
The simplest and most satisfactory view is that thought is simply behavior – verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt. It is not some mysterious process responsible for behavior but the very behavior itself in all the complexity of its controlling relations.
B. F. SKINNER







