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Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least.
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
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More quotes by B. F. Skinner
A child who has been severely punished for sex play is not necessarily less inclined to continue and a man who has been imprisoned for violent assault is not necessarily less inclined toward violence.
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The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
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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?
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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.
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Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.
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Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.
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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.
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I don't believe in God, so I'm not afraid of dying.
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The extent to which human aggression exemplifies innate tendencies is not clear.
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Something doing every minute' may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.
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At this very moment enormous numbers of intelligent men and women of goodwill are trying to build a better world. But problems are born faster than they can be solved.
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Punitive measures whether administered by police, teachers, spouses or parents have well known standard effects: (1) escape-education has its own name for that: truancy, (2) counterattack-vandalism on schools and attacks on teachers, (3) apathy-a sullen do-nothing withdrawal. The more violent the punishment, the more serious the by-products.
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We shouldn't teach great books we should teach a love of reading.
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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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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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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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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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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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We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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