B. F. Skinner Quotes

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.

~ 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

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.

~ B. F. Skinner

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

~ 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

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

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

~ 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

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

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

~ 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