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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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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When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
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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 real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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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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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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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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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 shapes people's actions.
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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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I don't know whether I want to improve religion or not. I prefer to get rid of it.
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We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
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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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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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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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Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
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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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I do not admire myself as a person. My successes do not override my shortcomings.
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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.