B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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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A child who has been severely punished for sex play is not necessarily less inclined to continue; and a man who has been imprisoned for violent assault is not necessarily less inclined toward violence.
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Any single historical event is too complex to be adequately known by anyone. It transcends all the intellectual capacities of men. Our practice is to wait until a sufficient number of details have been forgotten. Of course things seem simpler then! Our memories work that way; we retain the facts which are easiest to think about.
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Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.
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I do not admire myself as a person. My successes do not override my shortcomings.
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Those who have had anything useful to say have said it far too often, and those who have had nothing to say have been no more reticent.
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I will be dead in a few months. But it hasn't given me the slightest anxiety or worry. I always knew I was going to die.
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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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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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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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It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.
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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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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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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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I am opposed to the military use of animals. I am also opposed to the military use of men.
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I don't think my mother and father ever had any doubts about what I was to be punished for or not. My parents come from a very strictly defined culture.
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At this very moment enormous numbers of intelligent men and women of goodwill are trying to build a better world. But problems are born faster than they can be solved.
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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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We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
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Religions work for their own aggrandizement - strengthen the church and so on - and they use reinforcers of one kind or another to get obedience and so on from their communicants.
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A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process.
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Even the mundane task of washing dishes by hand is an example of the small tasks and personal activities that once filled people's daily lives with a sense of achievement.
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I think my novel, 'Walden Two,' has made people stop and look at the culture they have inherited and wonder if it is the last word or whether it can be changed.