B. F. Skinner
What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.Collection: Names
Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.Collection: Wish
Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.Collection: Men
Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.Collection: Behavior
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.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Mistake
Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Education
If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.Collection: Illusion
An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.Collection: Education
Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.Collection: Men
Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?Collection: School
Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.Collection: Education
To say that... behaviors have different 'meanings' is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.Collection: Variables
A self is a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies.Collection: Self
Teachers must learn how to teach ... they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Education
Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.Collection: Justice
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.Collection: Effort
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.Collection: Education
I've often said that my rats have taught me much more than I've taught them.Collection: Rats
The simplest and most satisfactory view is that thought is simply behavior - verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt. It is not some mysterious process responsible for behavior but the very behavior itself in all the complexity of its controlling relations.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Beautiful
A first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.Collection: Running
When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.Collection: Men
Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. It enslaves him almost before he has tasted freedom. The 'ologies' will tell you how its done Theology calls it building a conscience or developing a spirit of selflessness. Psychology calls it the growth of the superego. Considering how long society has been at it, you'd expect a better job. But the campaigns have been badly planned and the victory has never been secured.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Tasks
The problem of far greater importance remains to be solved. Rather than build a world in which we shall all live well, we must stop building one in which it will be impossible to live at all.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Views
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Intelligent
The one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us - here and now.Collection: Good Life
Men build society and society builds men.Collection: Men
Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Disappointment
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!Collection: Selfish
The juvenile delinquent does not feel his disturbed personality. The intelligent man does not feel his intelligence or the introvert his introversion.Collection: Intelligent
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.Collection: Worry
I don't believe in God, so I'm not afraid of dying.Collection: Believe
Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.Collection: Thinking
The majority of people don't want to plan. They want to be free of the responsibility of planning. What they ask for is merely some assurance that they will be decently provided for. The rest is a day-to-day enjoyment of life. That's the explanation for your Father Divines; people naturally flock to anyone they can trust for the necessities of life... They are the backbone of a community--solid, trust-worthy, essential.Collection: Father
We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement.Collection: Mutation
To say that a man is sinful because he sins is to give an operational definition of sin. To say that he sins because he is sinful is to trace his behavior to a supposed inner trait. But whether or not a person engages in the kind of behavior called sinful depends upon circumstances which are not mentioned in either question. The sin assigned as an inner possession (the sin a person "knows") is to be found in a history of reinforcement.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Teacher
The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Philosophy
Society already possesses the psychological techniques needed to obtain universal observance of a code - a code which would guarantee the success of a community or state. The difficulty is that these techniques are in the hands of the wrong people-or, rather, there aren't any right people.Collection: Hands
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.Collection: Art