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B. F. Skinner Quotes

List of quotations and sayings by the american psychologist B. F. Skinner on topics like people, kind, behavior

  • The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.

    — B. F. Skinner on actions
    12
  • Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

    — B. F. Skinner on society
    12
  • Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

    — B. F. Skinner on education
    5
  • B. F. Skinner quote Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

    Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

    — B. F. Skinner
    11
  • Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.

    — B. F. Skinner on leadership
    3
  • We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

    — B. F. Skinner on books
    3
  • What are the best B. F. Skinner quotes?
    Try the Top 10 list of B. F. Skinner quotes and images

  • 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 on failure
    2
  • The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

    — B. F. Skinner on technology
    0
  • Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.

    — B. F. Skinner on positive
    0
  • I am opposed to the military use of animals. I am also opposed to the military use of men.

    — B. F. Skinner on animals
    0
  • I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.

    — B. F. Skinner on control
    0
  • 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 on environment
    0
  • You can get along very well in this world by simply coming up with a quantity of reasonably valid statements.

    — B. F. Skinner on world
    0
  • About B. F. Skinner

    Name B. F. Skinner
    Quotes 42 quotations
    Nationality American
    Profession Psychologist
    Birthday March 20, 1904
    About Burrhus Frederic Skinner, commonly known as B. F. Skinner, was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.
    Top topics people, kind, behavior, culture, opposed
  • Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate the subject matters.

    — B. F. Skinner on manners
    0
  • I don't think my mother and father ever had any doubts about what I was to be punished for or not. My parents come from a very strictly defined culture.

    — B. F. Skinner on mother
    0
  • 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 on culture
    0
  • The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned.

    — B. F. Skinner on pollution
    0
  • Related Authors

    • Thomas Szasz
    • Eleanor Roosevelt
    • Martin Luther King, Jr.
    • Benjamin Franklin
    • Wayne Dyer
    • Viktor E. Frankl
    • Dr. Seuss
    • John F. Kennedy
    • Mark Twain
    • Sigmund Freud
    • Alfred Adler
    • Steve Maraboli
    • Ralph Waldo Emerson
    • Havelock Ellis
    • Abraham Lincoln
    • Nathaniel Branden
  • Great scientific contributions have been techniques.

    — B. F. Skinner on scientific
    0
  • When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.

    — B. F. Skinner on interesting
    0
  • No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been.

    — B. F. Skinner on theory
    0
  • 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 on faith
    0
  • 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 on achievement
    0
  • 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 on business
    0
  • 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 on live
    0
  • The environment shapes people's actions.

    — B. F. Skinner on people
    0
  • If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down.

    — B. F. Skinner on society
    0
  • 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 on future
    0
  • I never really expected to be controversial.

    — B. F. Skinner on controversial
    0
  • Reinforcement is being right.

    — B. F. Skinner on reinforcement
    0
  • We have not yet seen what man can make of man.

    — B. F. Skinner on man
    0
  • 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 on future
    0
  • If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment.

    — B. F. Skinner on change
    0
  • 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 on people
    0
  • What is sought can never produce the seeking.

    — B. F. Skinner on seeking
    0
  • I don't know whether I want to improve religion or not. I prefer to get rid of it.

    — B. F. Skinner on religion
    0
  • 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 on life
    0
  • The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry.

    — B. F. Skinner on feeling
    0
  • 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 on decisions
    0
  • 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 on work
    0
  • Behavior used to be reinforced by great deprivation;

    if people weren't hungry, they wouldn't work. Now we are committed to feeding people whether they work or not. Nor is money as great a reinforcer as it once was. People no longer work for punitive reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions.

    — B. F. Skinner on work
    0
  • A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way;

    at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.

    — B. F. Skinner on person
    0
  • The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.

    — B. F. Skinner on positive
    0
  • 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 on children
    0
  • Related Topics

    • actions
    • consequences
    • act
    • affect
    • probability
    • occurring
    • society
    • attacks
    • early
    • individual
    • helpless
    • education
    • survives
    • learned
    • forgotten
    • leadership
    • give
    • child
    • shape
    • books
    • love
    • reading
    • teach
    • great
    • failure
    • mistake
    • simply
    • circumstances
    • real
    • stop
    • technology
    • machines
    • problem
    • men
    • positive

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