B. F. Skinner Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von B. F. Skinner:

I never really expected to be controversial.

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.

B. F. Skinner

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?

B. F. Skinner

Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.

B. F. Skinner

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

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

Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.

B. F. Skinner

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.

B. F. Skinner

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

B. F. Skinner

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

B. F. Skinner

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

B. F. Skinner

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.

B. F. Skinner

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

B. F. Skinner

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

B. F. Skinner

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

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

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

B. F. Skinner

I'm very pessimistic.

B. F. Skinner

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.

B. F. Skinner

I never really expected to be controversial.

B. F. Skinner

Great scientific contributions have been techniques.

B. F. Skinner

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.

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

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

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

I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.

B. F. Skinner