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.
B. F. SKINNERGive me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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.
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In a world of complete economic equality, you get and keep the affections you deserve. You can’t buy love with gifts or favors, you can’t hold love by raising an inadequate child, and you can’t be secure in love by serving as a good scrub woman or a good provider.
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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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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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Men build society and society builds men.
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I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
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An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.
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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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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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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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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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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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Your liberals and radicals all want to govern. They want to try it their way- to show that people will be happier if the power is wielded in a different way or for different purposes. But how do they know? Have they ever tried it? No, it’s merely their guess.
B. F. SKINNER