A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
B. F. SKINNERIf you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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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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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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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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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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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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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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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The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
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The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.
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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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…not everyone is willing to defend a position of ‘not knowing.’ There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.
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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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The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.
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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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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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