Top 137 Quotes & Sayings by B. F. Skinner - Page 2

In the traditional view, a person is free. He is autonomous in the sense that his behavior is uncaused. He can therefore be held responsible for what he does and justly punished if he offends. That view, together with its associated practices, must be re-examined when a scientific analysis reveals unsuspected controlling relations between behavior and environment.

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.

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. It enslaves him almost before he has tasted freedom. The 'ologies' will tell you how its done Theology calls it building a conscience or developing a spirit of selflessness. Psychology calls it the growth of the superego. Considering how long society has been at it, you'd expect a better job. But the campaigns have been badly planned and the victory has never been secured.

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.

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

When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.

The majority of people don't want to plan. They want to be free of the responsibility of planning. What they ask for is merely some assurance that they will be decently provided for. The rest is a day-to-day enjoyment of life. That's the explanation for your Father Divines; people naturally flock to anyone they can trust for the necessities of life... They are the backbone of a community--solid, trust-worthy, essential.

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.

Society already possesses the psychological techniques needed to obtain universal observance of a code - a code which would guarantee the success of a community or state. The difficulty is that these techniques are in the hands of the wrong people-or, rather, there aren't any right people.

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.

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.

To say that a man is sinful because he sins is to give an operational definition of sin. To say that he sins because he is sinful is to trace his behavior to a supposed inner trait. But whether or not a person engages in the kind of behavior called sinful depends upon circumstances which are not mentioned in either question. The sin assigned as an inner possession (the sin a person "knows") is to be found in a history of reinforcement.

Better contraceptives will control population only if people will use them. A nuclear holocaust can be prevented only if the conditions under which nations make war can be changed. The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned. We need to make vast changes in human behavior.

A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he's often sure he can find one. And that's a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.

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

In the world at large we seldom vote for a principle or a given state of affairs. We vote for a man who pretends to believe in that principle or promises to achieve that state. We don't want a man, we want a condition of peace and plenty-- or, it may be, war and want-- but we must vote for a man.

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.

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.

Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.

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.

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.

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.

Teachers must learn how to teach ... they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.

...not everyone is willing to defend a position of 'not knowing.' There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.

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.

I've had only one idea in my life - a true idee fixe. To put it as bluntly as possible - the idea of having my own way. 'Control!' expresses it. The control of human behavior. In my early experimental days it was a frenzied, selfish desire to dominate. I remember the rage I used to feel when a prediction went awry. I could have shouted at the subjects of my experiments, 'Behave, damn you! Behave as you ought!

Men build society and society builds men.

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.

A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.

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

But restraint is the only one sort of control, and absence of restraint isn't freedom. It's not control that's lacking when one feels 'free', but the objectionable control of force.

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

Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.

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.

In a world of complete economic equality, you get and keep the affections you deserve. You can't buy love with gifts or favors, you can't hold love by raising an inadequate child, and you can't be secure in love by serving as a good scrub woman or a good provider.

The juvenile delinquent does not feel his disturbed personality. The intelligent man does not feel his intelligence or the introvert his introversion.

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

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

I will be dead in a few months. But it hasn't given me the slightest anxiety or worry. I always knew I was going to die.

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

It is a surprising fact that those who object most violently to the manipulation of behaviour nevertheless make the most vigorous effort to manipulate minds.

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

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

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

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 alphabet was a great invention, which enabled men to store and to learn with little effort what others had learned the hard way-that is, to learn from books rather than from direct, possibly painful, contact with the real world.

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.

Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli

The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.

The simulated approval and affection with which parents and teachers are often urged to solve behavior problems are counterfeit. So are flattery, backslap-ping, and many other ways of "winning friends.

To require a citizen to sign a loyalty oath is to destroy some of the loyalty he could otherwise claim, since any subsequent loyal behavior may then be attributed to the oath.

We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement.

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.

We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.

I may say that the only differences I expect to see revealed between the behavior of the rat and man (aside from enormous differences of complexity) lie in the field of verbal behavior.

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

Fame is also won at the expense of others. Even the well-deserved honors of the scientist or man of learning are unfair to many persons of equal achievements who get none. When one man gets a place in the sun, the others are put in a denser shade. From the point of view of the whole group there's no gain whatsoever, and perhaps a loss.

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.

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.

Except when physically restrained, a person is least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment, and unfortunately most people often are.