Top 100 B.F. Skinner Quotes
#1. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#2. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#3. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#4. No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been.
B.F. Skinner
#5. To require a citizen to sign a loyalty oath is to destroy some of the loyalty he could otherwise claim, since any subsequent loyal behavior may then be attributed to the oath.
B.F. Skinner
#6. That's all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
B.F. Skinner
#7. Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.
B.F. Skinner
#8. 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
#9. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#10. What is sought can never produce the seeking.
B.F. Skinner
#11. If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that's necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.
B.F. Skinner
#12. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#13. Something doing every minute' may be a gesture of despair
or the height of a battle against boredom.
B.F. Skinner
#14. The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned.
B.F. Skinner
#15. I've often said that my rats have taught me much more than I've taught them.
B.F. Skinner
#16. A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
B.F. Skinner
#17. Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.
B.F. Skinner
#18. The one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us - here and now.
B.F. Skinner
#19. The alphabet was a great invention, which enabled men to store and to learn with little effort what others had learned the hard way-that is, to learn from books rather than from direct, possibly painful, contact with the real world.
B.F. Skinner
#20. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#21. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#22. Nowadays, everybody fancies himself an expert in government and wants to have a say.
B.F. Skinner
#23. 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
#24. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#26. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#27. Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.
B.F. Skinner
#28. The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.
B.F. Skinner
#29. Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
B.F. Skinner
#30. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#31. When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
B.F. Skinner
#32. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#33. Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.
B.F. Skinner
#34. If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment.
B.F. Skinner
#35. The extent to which human aggression exemplifies innate tendencies is not clear.
B.F. Skinner
#36. The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
B.F. Skinner
#37. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#38. We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word 'admire' then means 'marvel at.'
B.F. Skinner
#39. The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.
B.F. Skinner
#40. The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
B.F. Skinner
#41. The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.
B.F. Skinner
#42. 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?
B.F. Skinner
#43. Compare two people, one of whom has been crippled by an accident, the other by an early environmental history which makes him lazy and, when criticized, mean. Both cause great inconvenience to others, but one dies a martyr, the other a scoundrel.
B.F. Skinner
#44. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#45. 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
#46. I believe that I have been basically anarchistic, anti-religion and anti-industry and business. In other words, anti-bureaucracy. I would like to see people behave well without having to have priests stand by, politicians stand by, or people collecting bills.
B.F. Skinner
#49. 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
#50. You can get along very well in this world by simply coming up with a quantity of reasonably valid statements.
B.F. Skinner
#51. I have to tell people that they are not responsible for their behavior. They're not creating it; they're not initiating anything. It's all found somewhere else. That's an awful lot to relinquish.
B.F. Skinner
#52. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#53. Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?
B.F. Skinner
#54. When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
B.F. Skinner
#55. I don't believe in God, so I'm not afraid of dying.
B.F. Skinner
#56. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#57. Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.
B.F. Skinner
#58. I don't know whether I want to improve religion or not. I prefer to get rid of it.
B.F. Skinner
#59. Teachers must learn how to teach ... they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.
B.F. Skinner
#60. The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry.
B.F. Skinner
#61. What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
B.F. Skinner
#62. Those few people who do respond to the dire conditions of the future - journalists, environmentalists, behavioral scientists - tend not to be powerful.
B.F. Skinner
#64. Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
B.F. Skinner
#65. The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
B.F. Skinner
#66. Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.
B.F. Skinner
#67. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#68. 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
#70. The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.
B.F. Skinner
#71. The consequences of behavior determine the probability that the behavior will occur again
B.F. Skinner
#72. Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
B.F. Skinner
#73. A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
B.F. Skinner
#74. In a pre-scientific society the best the common man can do is pin his faith on a leader and give him his support, trusting in his benevolence against the misuse of the delegated power and in his wisdom to govern justly and make war successfully.
B.F. Skinner
#75. In a democracy, there is no check against despotism, because the principle of democracy is supposed to be itself a check. But it guarantees only that the majority will not be despotically ruled.
B.F. Skinner
#76. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#77. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#78. If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down.
B.F. Skinner
#79. The final state of affairs may not have been foreseen. Perhaps we are merely reading a plan into the world after the fact.
B.F. Skinner
#80. Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
B.F. Skinner
#81. Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
B.F. Skinner
#82. I would have been glad to agree to let them all proceed henceforth in complete ignorance of psychology, if they would forget my opinion of chocolate sodas or the story of the amusing episode on a Spanish streetcar.
B.F. Skinner
#83. I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.
B.F. Skinner
#84. The human species took a crucial step forward when its vocal musculature came under operant control in the production of speech sounds. Indeed, it is possible that all the distinctive achievements of the species can be traced to that one genetic change.
B.F. Skinner
#85. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#86. The amateur doesn't appreciate the need for experimentation. He wants his experts to know.
B.F. Skinner
#87. Great scientific contributions have been techniques.
B.F. Skinner
#88. The tender sentiment of the 'one and only' has less to do with constancy of heart than with singleness of opportunity.
B.F. Skinner
#89. The world's a poor standard. any society which is free of hunger and violence looks bright against that background.
B.F. Skinner
#91. Overcrowding can be corrected only by inducing people not to crowd, and the environment will continue to deteriorate until polluting practices are abandoned.
B.F. Skinner
#92. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#93. 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
#94. An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.
B.F. Skinner
#95. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
B.F. Skinner
#99. We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.
B.F. Skinner
#100. 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.
B.F. Skinner
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