B. F. Skinner Quotes
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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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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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I don't deny the importance of genetics. However, the fact that I might be altruistic isn't because I have a gene for altruism; the fact that I do something for my children at some cost to myself comes from a history that has operated on me.
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It is a surprising fact that those who object most violently to the manipulation of behaviour nevertheless make the most vigorous effort to manipulate minds.
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The strengthening of behavior which results from reinforcement is appropriately called 'conditioning'. In operant conditioning we 'strengthen' an operant in the sense of making a response more probable or, in actual fact, more frequent.
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What is sought can never produce the seeking.
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I'm very pessimistic.
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If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment.
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An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.
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The severest trial of oppression is the constant outrage which one suffers at the thought of the oppressor. What Jesus discovered was how to avoid the inner devastations. His technique was to practice the opposite emotion... a man may not get his freedom or possessions back, but he's less miserable. It's a difficult lesson.
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I won't say that I'm an agnostic, since agnosticism maintains that one cannot know... but I'm not averse to the idea of some intelligence or some organizing force that set up the initial conditions of the universe in such a way that ultimately generated stars, planets and life.
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The people who control the condition in which we live have no reason to think beyond more than the next five or 10 years.
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In a world of complete economic equality, you get and keep the affections you deserve. You can't buy love with gifts or favors, you can't hold love by raising an inadequate child, and you can't be secure in love by serving as a good scrub woman or a good provider.
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The juvenile delinquent does not feel his disturbed personality. The intelligent man does not feel his intelligence or the introvert his introversion.
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Going out of style isn't a natural process, but a manipulated change which destroys the beauty of last year's dress in order to make it worthless.
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I never really expected to be controversial.
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You can get along very well in this world by simply coming up with a quantity of reasonably valid statements.
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The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.
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Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.
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We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.
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I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.
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Reinforcement is being right.
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It is not a question of starting. The start has been made. It's a question of what's to be done from now on.
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To say that... behaviors have different 'meanings' is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.