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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.
B. F. Skinner -
I'm very pessimistic.
B. F. Skinner
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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.
B. F. Skinner -
Your liberals and radicals all want to govern. They want to try it their way- to show that people will be happier if the power is wielded in a different way or for different purposes. But how do they know? Have they ever tried it? No, it's merely their guess.
B. F. Skinner -
If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment.
B. F. Skinner -
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.
B. F. Skinner -
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.
B. F. Skinner -
The people who control the condition in which we live have no reason to think beyond more than the next five or 10 years.
B. F. Skinner
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I never really expected to be controversial.
B. F. Skinner -
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.
B. F. Skinner -
An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.
B. F. Skinner -
Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.
B. F. Skinner -
You can get along very well in this world by simply coming up with a quantity of reasonably valid statements.
B. F. Skinner -
We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.
B. F. Skinner
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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.
B. F. Skinner -
I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.
B. F. Skinner -
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.
B. F. Skinner -
Reinforcement is being right.
B. F. Skinner -
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.
B. F. Skinner -
Great scientific contributions have been techniques.
B. F. Skinner
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To say that... behaviors have different 'meanings' is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
B. F. Skinner -
I remember when I was a freshman in college, I was still somewhat bothered by... worried... about religion. I remember going to this professor of philosophy and telling him that I had lost my faith.
B. F. Skinner -
Many social practices essential to the welfare of the species involve the control of one person by another, and no one can suppress them who has any concern for human achievements
B. F. Skinner -
A culture must be reasonably stable, but it must also change, and it will presumably be strongest if it can avoid excessive respect for tradition and fear of novelty on the one hand and excessively rapid change on the other.
B. F. Skinner