B. F. Skinner Quotes
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The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.
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When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
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A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
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Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
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Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.
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If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down.
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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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A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
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The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned.
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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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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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Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
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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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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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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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The environment shapes people's actions.
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No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been.
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Fame is also won at the expense of others. Even the well-deserved honors of the scientist or man of learning are unfair to many persons of equal achievements who get none. When one man gets a place in the sun, the others are put in a denser shade. From the point of view of the whole group there's no gain whatsoever, and perhaps a loss.
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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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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 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.