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If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.

B. F. Skinner

That’s all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
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Behavior Change Teaching Transformation
If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.
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Freedom Happiness Human Illusion Necessary
Something doing every minute’ may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.
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Action Battle Boredom
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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Important Talk
Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.
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Explanation Justice Person Question See Understand
No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn’t die out, it’s wiped out.
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Baby Curiosity Death Education Force Motivational Work
When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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Control Himself Men
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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Decision Design Direction Education Life Myself Reality
Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
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Easy Education Improvement Men Moon School
It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.
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Control Freedom Improvement Issues Men Mistake
The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.
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Army Battle Fear People
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.
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Control Education Mystery Relationship Responsible Satisfaction Simplicity View
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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Principle Recognition Run Study Yourself
To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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Control Deep Different Way
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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Attitude Character Nature Novel Respect Seen Selection Theory
The simulated approval and affection with which parents and teachers are often urged to solve behavior problems are counterfeit. So are flattery, backslap-ping, and many other ways of “winning friends.
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Affection Friendship Parents Problem Win

If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.

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If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.

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