A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he’s often sure he can find one. And that’s a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.
B. F. SKINNERA 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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
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Behavior is determined by its consequences.
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Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
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We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
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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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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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Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
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Something doing every minute’ may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.
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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 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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Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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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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The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
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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 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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