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A culture must be reasonably stable, but it must also change, and it will presumably be strongest if it can avoid excessive respect for tradition and fear of novelty on the one hand and excessively rapid change on the other.

B. F. Skinner

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B. F. Skinner
Age: 86 †
Born: 1904
Born: March 20
Died: 1990
Died: August 18
Autobiographer
Ethologist
Inventor
Philosopher
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
Susquehanna Depot
Pennsylvania
Burrhus Frederic Skinner
Skinner BF
moiksu moiii
Hands
Stable
Also
Strongest
Excessively
Change
Avoid
Presumably
Must
Tradition
Reasonably
Respect
Rapid
Hand
Excessive
Fear
Rapids
Culture
Novelty

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Fame is also won at the expense of others. Even the well-deserved honors of the scientist or man of learning are unfair to many persons of equal achievements who get none. When one man gets a place in the sun, the others are put in a denser shade. From the point of view of the whole group there's no gain whatsoever, and perhaps a loss.
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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.
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The extent to which human aggression exemplifies innate tendencies is not clear.
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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.
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Teachers must learn how to teach ... they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.
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Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word 'admire' then means 'marvel at.'
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Many social practices essential to the welfare of the species involve the control of one person by another, and no one can suppress them who has any concern for human achievements
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If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment.
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An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.
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A disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.
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It is not a question of starting. The start has been made. It's a question of what's to be done from now on.
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We shouldn't teach great books we should teach a love of reading.
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The alphabet was a great invention, which enabled men to store and to learn with little effort what others had learned the hard way-that is, to learn from books rather than from direct, possibly painful, contact with the real world.
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