B.F. Skinner Quotes

112 quotes in 1406 categories

• 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…
• Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
• 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…
• 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…
• Something doing every minute' may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.
• 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…
• That's all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
• 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.…
• The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.
• 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…
• We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word 'admire' then means 'marvel at.'
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.
• When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
• 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…
• The world's a poor standard. any society which is free of hunger and violence looks bright against that background.
• 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…
• Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli

Browse B.F. Skinner Quotes by Category