Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
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
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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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We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word ‘admire’ then means ‘marvel at.’
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Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
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I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
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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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A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
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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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Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
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Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
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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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Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?
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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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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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Teachers must learn how to teach they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.
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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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What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
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We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
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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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Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
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That’s all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
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I’ve often said that my rats have taught me much more than I’ve taught them.
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Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.
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Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
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Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.
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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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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.
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