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.
B. F. SKINNERDoes a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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Going out of style isn’t a natural process, but a manipulated change which destroys the beauty of last year’s dress in order to make it worthless.
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At this very moment enormous numbers of intelligent men and women of goodwill are trying to build a better world. But problems are born faster than they can be solved.
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The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.
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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.
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That’s all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
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Death does not trouble me. I have no fear of supernatural punishments, of course, nor could I enjoy an eternal life in which there would be nothing left for me to do, the task of living having been accomplished.
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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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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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Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
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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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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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Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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