B. F. Skinner Quotes

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment."

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

"When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it."

"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."

"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."

"Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful."

"Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless."

"The environment shapes people's actions."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down."

"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."

"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."

"What is sought can never produce the seeking."

"I'm very pessimistic."

"We have not yet seen what man can make of man."

"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."

"Reinforcement is being right."

"I never really expected to be controversial."

"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?"

"I am opposed to the military use of animals. I am also opposed to the military use of men."

"The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned."