B. F. Skinner Quotes
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Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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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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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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When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
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No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been.
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The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned.
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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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The environment shapes people's actions.
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The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
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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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Those few people who do respond to the dire conditions of the future - journalists, environmentalists, behavioral scientists - tend not to be powerful.
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Must we wait for selection to solve the problems of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, pollution of the environment and a nuclear holocaust, or can we take explicit steps to make our future more secure? In the latter case, must we not transcend selection?
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Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.
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Behavior used to be reinforced by great deprivation; if people weren't hungry, they wouldn't work. Now we are committed to feeding people whether they work or not. Nor is money as great a reinforcer as it once was. People no longer work for punitive reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions.
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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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We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
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I don't know whether I want to improve religion or not. I prefer to get rid of it.
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The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry.
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If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment.
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Ethical control may survive in small groups, but the control of the population as a whole must be delegated to specialists-to police, priests, owners, teachers, therapists, and so on, with their specialized reinforcers and their codified contingencies.
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I'm very pessimistic.
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I never really expected to be controversial.