B. F. Skinner Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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I get up, go and get a coffee, and go do the crossword - I'm loyal to one particular paper, the 'Guardian' - and that's my idea of a perfect morning.
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I spend my life essentially alone at a computer. That doesn't change. I have the same challenges every day.
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You're going through the horror of it, you're going through the isolation of it but you're being empowered by reminding yourself that you're connected to everybody else.
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The science of life is changing hearts and minds.
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In combat sports, personalities are what draw.
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I think if you talk to my colleagues, I was less than a fearsome individual.
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There are so many different criteria for my collecting, and I have to confess that the goalposts do shift. But obviously, with my background, I am particularly drawn to things that have been documented in contemporary magazines.
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Knowing policy does help make the gossip more understandable.
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I have to expend an awful lot of energy actively undoing the impact of my name. Understandably, people assume that I have at least some connection to Iran. The truth is that I don't. I have very little knowledge about the culture, the language, the history. I've never been to Iran. I've never even been inside a mosque.
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I'm an Oscar nominee. I love saying that. Whatever happens, I'm going to sing that 'I'm an Oscar nominee' part.
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I wish I sang better.
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I learned that we can do anything, but we can't do everything... at least not at the same time. So think of your priorities not in terms of what activities you do, but when you do them. Timing is everything.
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When I'm actually writing by hand, I get more of a sense of the rhythm of sentences, of syntax. The switch to the computer is when I actually start thinking about lines. That's the workhorse part. At that point, I'm being more mathematical about putting the poem on the page and less intuitive about the rhythm of the syntax.
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I had really bad obsessive-compulsive disorder. At its worst, I was compelled to leave my house at three o'clock in the morning and go out in the alley because I just knew that the paper-towel roll I threw in the recycling bin was uncomfortable, like it was lying the wrong way, and I would be down in the garbage.
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Continuous persecution of widows and orphans is a crime. Even the Bible says there is a specific place in hell for those who oppress widows.
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I was the family alien. Both my parents are quite creative, but I was... appalling... always putting on little shows. I was rather a shy child, not a natural performer, but there was a performative edge to everything I did.
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A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been.
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We have not invaded anyone. We have not conquered anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and tried to enforce our way of life on them.
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I found collaborating with congenial doctors about problems that physicists could help solve was very satisfying. I also like educating anybody who would listen!
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Society today is no longer in revolt against particular laws which it finds alien, unjust, and imposed, but against law as such, against the principle of law. And yet we must not regard this revolt as entirely negative. The energy that rejects many obsolete laws is an entirely positive impulse for renewal of life and law.
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Art has to be reflective of our society.
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It's too presumptuous and naïve to think you can change society by a photograph or anything else... I equate that with propaganda; I think that's a lower rank of purpose.
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In the 1980s, there were occasions when it made sense to say, 'it is too difficult to maximize the likelihood function, and besides if we do, it will blow our model out of the water.'
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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.
