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.
B. F. SKINNERGive me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
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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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Teachers must learn how to teach they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.
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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 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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An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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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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The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.
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I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
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Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
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The alphabet was a great invention, which enabled men to store and to learn with little effort what others had learned the hard way-that is, to learn from books rather than from direct, possibly painful, contact with the real world.
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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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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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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.
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If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.
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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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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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