Quotes from B. F. Skinner

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

Those few people who do respond to the dire conditions of the future - journalists, environmentalists, behavioral scientists - tend not to be powerful.

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.

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

No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been.

A vast technology has been developed to prevent, reduce, or terminate exhausting labor and physical damage. It is now dedicated to the production of the most trivial conveniences and comfort.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I would have been glad to agree to let them all proceed henceforth in complete ignorance of psychology, if they would forget my opinion of chocolate sodas or the story of the amusing episode on a Spanish streetcar.

One person manages another in the sense that he manages himself. He does not do so by changing feelings or states of mind. The Greek gods were said to change behavior by giving men mental states such as pride, mental confusion, or courage, but no one has been successful in doing so since. One person changes the behavior of another by changing the world in which he lives. In doing so, he no doubt changes what the other person feels or introspectively observes.

If there is any purpose or direction in the evolution of a culture, it has to do with bringing people under the control of more and more of the consequences of their behaviour.

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.

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.

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

I think my novel, 'Walden Two,' has made people stop and look at the culture they have inherited and wonder if it is the last word or whether it can be changed.

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.

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

Reinforcement is being right.

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.

I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.