I’ve often said that my rats have taught me much more than I’ve taught them.
B. F. SKINNERWe are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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A child who has been severely punished for sex play is not necessarily less inclined to continue; and a man who has been imprisoned for violent assault is not necessarily less inclined toward violence.
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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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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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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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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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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
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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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We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.
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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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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 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.
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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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Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
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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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The problem of far greater importance remains to be solved. Rather than build a world in which we shall all live well, we must stop building one in which it will be impossible to live at all.
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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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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 permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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Men build society and society builds men.
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Society 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.
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Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.
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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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Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
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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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