Quotes from B. F. Skinner

The environment shapes people's actions.

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'm very pessimistic.

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.

What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.

We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.

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

A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.

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

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.

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

I never really expected to be controversial.

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.

Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.

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.

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

I don't know whether I want to improve religion or not. I prefer to get rid of it.

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.

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

Great scientific contributions have been techniques.

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.

Men build society and society builds men.

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.

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