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
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.
--B.F. Skinner
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 punishment.
--B.F. Skinner
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.
--B.F. Skinner
Behavior is determined by its consequences.
--B.F. Skinner
Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
--B.F. Skinner
Democracy is the spawn of despotism. And like father, like son. Democracy is power and rule. It's not the will of the people, remember; it's the will of the majority.
--B.F. Skinner
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
--B.F. Skinner
Going out of style isn't a natural process, but a manipulated change which destroys the beauty of last year's dress in order to make it worthless.
--B.F. Skinner
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
If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that's necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.
--B.F. Skinner
Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.
--B.F. Skinner
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.
--B.F. Skinner
It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.
--B.F. Skinner
It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious.
--B.F. Skinner
Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
--B.F. Skinner
Men build society and society builds men.
--B.F. Skinner
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.
--B.F. Skinner
Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.
--B.F. Skinner
Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
--B.F. Skinner
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.
--B.F. Skinner
The more reason we have to pay attention to life, the less we have to pay attention to death.
--B.F. Skinner
The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.
--B.F. Skinner
The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
--B.F. Skinner
The world's a poor standard. any society which is free of hunger and violence looks bright against that background.
--B.F. Skinner
Those who have had anything useful to say have said it far too often, and those who have had nothing to say have been no more reticent.
--B.F. Skinner
We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word 'admire' then means 'marvel at.'
--B.F. Skinner
We are all controlled by the world in which we live, and part of that world has been and will be constructed by men. The question is this: are we to be controlled by accidents, by tyrants, or by ourselves in effective cultural design?
--B.F. Skinner
We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
--B.F. Skinner
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.
--B.F. Skinner
Found 30 occurence(s) in 52,075 quotation(s).