B. F. Skinner Quotes

Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.

The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.

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

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

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.

That's all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.

The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.

What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.

We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.

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.

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.

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.

A self is a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies.

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.

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

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.

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.

An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.

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.

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

I've often said that my rats have taught me much more than I've taught them.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.

The juvenile delinquent does not feel his disturbed personality.

The intelligent man does not feel his intelligence or the introvert his introversion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us - here and now.

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.

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.

If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.

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

Punitive measures whether administered by police, teachers, spouses or parents have well known standard effects: (1) escape-education has its own name for that: truancy, (2) counterattack-vandalism on schools and attacks on teachers, (3) apathy-a sullen do-nothing withdrawal. The more violent the punishment, the more serious the by-products.

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.

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.

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 evolution of cultures appears to follow the pattern of the evolution of species. The many different forms of culture which arise correspond to the "mutations" of genetic theory. Some forms prove to be effective under prevailing circumstances and others not, and the perpetuation of the culture is determined accordingly.

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.

To say that... behaviors have different 'meanings' is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.

The severest trial of oppression is the constant outrage which one suffers at the thought of the oppressor. What Jesus discovered was how to avoid the inner devastations. His technique was to practice the opposite emotion... a man may not get his freedom or possessions back, but he's less miserable. It's a difficult lesson.

We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word 'admire' then means 'marvel at.'

If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment.

Any single historical event is too complex to be adequately known by anyone.

It transcends all the intellectual capacities of men. Our practice is to wait until a sufficient number of details have been forgotten. Of course things seem simpler then! Our memories work that way; we retain the facts which are easiest to think about.

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.

Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?

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.

I don't believe in God, so I'm not afraid of dying.

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.

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.