Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.
B. F. SKINNERYour 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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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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I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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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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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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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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The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
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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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If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.
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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 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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The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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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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That’s all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
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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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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 fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process.
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Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.
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To require a citizen to sign a loyalty oath is to destroy some of the loyalty he could otherwise claim, since any subsequent loyal behavior may then be attributed to the oath.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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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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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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