“A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.”

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.

If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.

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.

Society already possesses the psychological techniques needed to obtain universal observance of a code – a code which would guarantee the success of a community or state. The difficulty is that these techniques are in the hands of the wrong people-or, rather, there aren’t any right people.

The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.

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.

Men build society and society builds men.

Something doing every minute’ may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.

Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.

We have not yet seen what man can make of man.

…not everyone is willing to defend a position of ‘not knowing.’ There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.

I may say that the only differences I expect to see revealed between the behavior of the rat and man (aside from enormous differences of complexity) lie in the field of verbal behavior.

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.

It is a surprising fact that those who object most violently to the manipulation of behaviour nevertheless make the most vigorous effort to manipulate minds.

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

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.

You can never change what you don’t confront and transform what you avoid.

The activity you’re most avoiding contains your biggest opportunity.

The desire to break the silence with constant human noise is, I believe, precisely an avoidance of the sacred terror of that divine encounter.

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

How strange! I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me.

The footsteps of Nature are to be trac’d, not only in her ordinary course, but when she seems to be put to her shifts, to make many doublings and turnings, and to use some kind of art in endeavouring to avoid our discovery.

Teamwork,” Koteks snarled, “is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It’s a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.

She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward, to be in closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding and dodging the stumbling feet of men.