About B. F. Skinner: Burrhus Frederic 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.
If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment.
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.
A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
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 collecti...
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.
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.
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
Great scientific contributions have been techniques.
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 ...
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.
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...
Those few people who do respond to the dire conditions of the future - journalists, environmentalists, behavioral scientists - tend not to be powerful.
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 genera...
Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.
The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry.
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.
No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been.
