Best 92 quotes of B. F. Skinner on MyQuotes

B. F. Skinner

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    B. F. Skinner

    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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    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.

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    B. F. Skinner

    A disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.

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    B. F. Skinner

    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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    B. F. Skinner

    A first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.

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    B. F. Skinner

    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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    B. F. Skinner

    An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.

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    B. F. Skinner

    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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    B. F. Skinner

    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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    B. F. Skinner

    A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.

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    B. F. Skinner

    A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he's often sure he can find one. And that's a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.

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    B. F. Skinner

    A self is a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies.

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    B. F. Skinner

    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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    B. F. Skinner

    A vast technology has been developed to prevent, reduce, or terminate exhausting labor and physical damage. It is now dedicated to the production of the most trivial conveniences and comfort.

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    B. F. Skinner

    Behavior is determined by its consequences.

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    B. F. Skinner

    Better contraceptives will control population only if people will use them. A nuclear holocaust can be prevented only if the conditions under which nations make war can be changed. The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned. We need to make vast changes in human behavior.

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    B. F. Skinner

    But restraint is the only one sort of control, and absence of restraint isn't freedom. It's not control that's lacking when one feels 'free', but the objectionable control of force.

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    B. F. Skinner

    Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.

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    B. F. Skinner

    Death does not trouble me. I have no fear of supernatural punishments, of course, nor could I enjoy an eternal life in which there would be nothing left for me to do, the task of living having been accomplished.

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    B. F. Skinner

    Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?

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    B. F. Skinner

    Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.

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    B. F. Skinner

    Each of us has interests which conflict the interests of everybody else... 'everybody else' we call 'society'. It's a powerful opponent and it always wins. Oh, here and there an individual prevails for a while and gets what he wants. Sometimes he storms the culture of a society and changes it to his own advantage. But society wins in the long run, for it has the advantage of numbers and of age.

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    B. F. Skinner

    Except when physically restrained, a person is least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment, and unfortunately most people often are.

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    B. F. Skinner

    Fame is also won at the expense of others. Even the well-deserved honors of the scientist or man of learning are unfair to many persons of equal achievements who get none. When one man gets a place in the sun, the others are put in a denser shade. From the point of view of the whole group there's no gain whatsoever, and perhaps a loss.

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    B. F. Skinner

    Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.

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    B. F. Skinner

    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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    B. F. Skinner

    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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    B. F. Skinner

    I don't believe in God, so I'm not afraid of dying.

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    B. F. Skinner

    If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.

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    B. F. Skinner

    If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment.

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    B. F. Skinner

    I may say that the only differences I expect to see revealed between the behavior of the rat and man (aside from enormous differences of complexity) lie in the field of verbal behavior.

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    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.

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    B. F. Skinner

    Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.

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    B. F. Skinner

    In the traditional view, a person is free. He is autonomous in the sense that his behavior is uncaused. He can therefore be held responsible for what he does and justly punished if he offends. That view, together with its associated practices, must be re-examined when a scientific analysis reveals unsuspected controlling relations between behavior and environment.

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    B. F. Skinner

    In the world at large we seldom vote for a principle or a given state of affairs. We vote for a man who pretends to believe in that principle or promises to achieve that state. We don't want a man, we want a condition of peace and plenty-- or, it may be, war and want-- but we must vote for a man.

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    B. F. Skinner

    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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    B. F. Skinner

    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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    B. F. Skinner

    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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    B. F. Skinner

    I've had only one idea in my life - a true idee fixe. To put it as bluntly as possible - the idea of having my own way. 'Control!' expresses it. The control of human behavior. In my early experimental days it was a frenzied, selfish desire to dominate. I remember the rage I used to feel when a prediction went awry. I could have shouted at the subjects of my experiments, 'Behave, damn you! Behave as you ought!

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    B. F. Skinner

    I've often said that my rats have taught me much more than I've taught them.

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    B. F. Skinner

    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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    B. F. Skinner

    Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived," but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. 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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    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

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    B. F. Skinner

    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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    B. F. Skinner

    No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn't die out, it's wiped out.

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    B. F. Skinner

    ...not everyone is willing to defend a position of 'not knowing.' There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.

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    B. F. Skinner

    No theory changes what it is a theory about. Nothing is changed because we look at it, talk about it, or analyze it in a new way. Keats drank confusion to Newton for analyzing the rainbow, but the rainbow remained as beautiful as ever and became for many even more beautiful. Man has not changed because we look at him, talk about him, and analyze him scientifically. ... What does change is our chance of doing something about the subject of a theory. Newton's analysis of the light in a rainbow was a step in the direction of the laser.

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    B. F. Skinner

    Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.

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    B. F. Skinner

    Overcrowding can be corrected only by inducing people not to crowd, and the environment will continue to deteriorate until polluting practices are abandoned.

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    B. F. Skinner

    Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli