Tag: B. F. Skinner
-
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.
B. F. Skinner
-
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 reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions.
B. F. Skinner
-
A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
B. F. Skinner
-
No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been.
B. F. Skinner
-
The people who control the condition in which we live have no reason to think beyond more than the next five or 10 years.
B. F. Skinner
-
I don’t think my mother and father ever had any doubts about what I was to be punished for or not. My parents come from a very strictly defined culture.
B. F. Skinner
-
I don’t know whether I want to improve religion or not. I prefer to get rid of it.
B. F. Skinner
-
We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
B. F. Skinner
-
We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
B. F. Skinner
-
I never really expected to be controversial.
B. F. Skinner