B. F. Skinner Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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

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

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.

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.

Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.

A first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.

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

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.

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.

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

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

No theory changes what it is a theory about. Nothing is changed because we look at it, talk about it, or analyze it in a new way. Keats drank confusion to Newton for analyzing the rainbow, but the rainbow remained as beautiful as ever and became for many even more beautiful. Man has not changed because we look at him, talk about him, and analyze him scientifically. ... What does change is our chance of doing something about the subject of a theory. Newton's analysis of the light in a rainbow was a step in the direction of the laser.

Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?