Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
B. F. SKINNERAn important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.
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The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
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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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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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Except when physically restrained, a person is least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment, and unfortunately most people often are.
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Your 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.
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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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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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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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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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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Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.
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It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student’s life.
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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.
B. F. SKINNER