Quotes from B. F. Skinner

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.

The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry.

The people who control the condition in which we live have no reason to think beyond more than the next five or 10 years.

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

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

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

What is sought can never produce the seeking.

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

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

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.

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.

The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.

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

Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.

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

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.

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

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

Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.

You can get along very well in this world by simply coming up with a quantity of reasonably valid statements.

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

Going out of style isn't a natural process, but a manipulated change which destroys the beauty of last year's dress in order to make it worthless.

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.

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.