Top 100 B F Skinner Quotes
#1. As an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1960s, I was fascinated by my visits to psychologist B.F. Skinner's laboratory.
Andrew Weil
#2. There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B. F. Skinner.
Jacob Bronowski
#3. Carrot-and-stick reinforcement' the behaviorists are telling us is needed for this bird to carry out these operations, thirteen different types of construction jobs? B. F. Skinner did a very good thing: in World War
William Peter Blatty
#4. Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.
B.F. Skinner
#5. The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
B.F. Skinner
#6. 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
#7. I don't believe in God, so I'm not afraid of dying.
B.F. Skinner
#8. When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
B.F. Skinner
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences
B.F. Skinner
#12. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#13. The simulated approval and affection with which parents and teachers are often urged to solve behavior problems are counterfeit. So are flattery, backslap-ping, and many other ways of winning friends.
B.F. Skinner
#14. Those who have had anything useful to say have said it far too often, and those who have had nothing to say have been no more reticent.
B.F. Skinner
#15. 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
#16. You can get along very well in this world by simply coming up with a quantity of reasonably valid statements.
B.F. Skinner
#17. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.
B.F. Skinner
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Not everyone is willing to defend a position of 'not knowing.' There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.
B.F. Skinner
#34. A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
B.F. Skinner
#35. Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
B.F. Skinner
#36. The consequences of behavior determine the probability that the behavior will occur again
B.F. Skinner
#37. The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.
B.F. Skinner
#39. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#40. I don't know whether I want to improve religion or not. I prefer to get rid of it.
B.F. Skinner
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
B.F. Skinner
#44. Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.
B.F. Skinner
#45. 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
#46. Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
B.F. Skinner
#48. 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
#49. What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
B.F. Skinner
#50. The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry.
B.F. Skinner
#51. Teachers must learn how to teach ... they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.
B.F. Skinner
#52. What is sought can never produce the seeking.
B.F. Skinner
#53. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#54. 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
#55. Behavior is determined by its consequences.
B.F. Skinner
#56. Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.
B.F. Skinner
#57. A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
B.F. Skinner
#58. 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
#59. I am opposed to the military use of animals. I am also opposed to the military use of men.
B.F. Skinner
#60. I've often said that my rats have taught me much more than I've taught them.
B.F. Skinner
#61. The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned.
B.F. Skinner
#62. Something doing every minute' may be a gesture of despair
or the height of a battle against boredom.
B.F. Skinner
#63. 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
#64. If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that's necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.
B.F. Skinner
#65. 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
#66. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.
B.F. Skinner
#70. That's all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
B.F. Skinner
#71. 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
#72. No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been.
B.F. Skinner
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. To say that ... behaviors have different 'meanings' is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
B.F. Skinner
#77. Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
B.F. Skinner
#78. We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word 'admire' then means 'marvel at.'
B.F. Skinner
#79. 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
#80. I never really expected to be controversial.
B.F. Skinner
#81. The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
B.F. Skinner
#82. The extent to which human aggression exemplifies innate tendencies is not clear.
B.F. Skinner
#83. If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment.
B.F. Skinner
#84. 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
#85. Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.
B.F. Skinner
#86. 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
#87. When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
B.F. Skinner
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.
B.F. Skinner
#92. 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
#93. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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.
B.F. Skinner
#98. Nowadays, everybody fancies himself an expert in government and wants to have a say.
B.F. Skinner
#99. 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
#100. 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
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