B.F. Skinner Quotes (30 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Beyond Freedom and Dignity

B.F. Skinner

B.F. Skinner: 30 quotes28 likes

Famous B.F. Skinner Quotes

“Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.”

B.F. Skinner Walden Two

Walden Two (1948), p. 95.

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

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

“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.”

B.F. Skinner Walden Two

Source: Walden Two

“Nowadays, everybody fancies himself an expert in government and wants to have a say.”

B.F. Skinner Walden Two

Source: Walden Two

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

B.F. Skinner

Freedom and the control of men (1955/1956) American Scholar, 25 (1), 47-65.

B.F. Skinner Quotes about the trip

“A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.”

B.F. Skinner book Beyond Freedom and Dignity

Source: Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972).

“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.”

B.F. Skinner Walden Two

Source: Walden Two

“It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.”

B.F. Skinner

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

B.F. Skinner

As quoted in Meditations for Parents Who Do Too Much (1993) by Jonathon Lazear and Wendy Lazear, p. 5.

“Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived", but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious.
It is a difficult assignment. The conditions the teacher arranges must be powerful enough to compete with those under which the student tends to behave in distracting ways.”

B.F. Skinner

"Free and Happy Student" in The Phi Delta Kappan (September 1973); later published in Reflections on Behaviorism and Society (1978)

B.F. Skinner Quotes

“If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.”

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

As quoted in "Unpacking the Skinner Box : Revisiting B. F. Skinner through a Postformal Lens" by Dana Salter in The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology Vol. 4 (2008) edited by Joe L. Kincheloe and Raymond A. Horn, Ch. 99, p. 872.

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

B.F. Skinner

As quoted in B. F. Skinner : The Man and His Ideas (1968) by Richard Isadore Evans, p. 73.
Context: We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

“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.”

B.F. Skinner Walden Two

Source: Walden Two

“No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn't die out, it's wiped out.”

B.F. Skinner Walden Two

Source: Walden Two

“The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.”

B.F. Skinner

Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis (1969).
Source: Contingencies Of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis

“We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.”

B.F. Skinner Walden Two

Source: Walden Two

“It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious.”

B.F. Skinner

"Free and Happy Student" in The Phi Delta Kappan (September 1973); later published in Reflections on Behaviorism and Society (1978).
Context: Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived", but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious.
It is a difficult assignment. The conditions the teacher arranges must be powerful enough to compete with those under which the student tends to behave in distracting ways.

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

B.F. Skinner

"New methods and new aims in teaching", in New Scientist, 22(392) (21 May 1964), pp.483-4.

“A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process.”

B.F. Skinner Walden Two

Source: Walden Two

“What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.”

B.F. Skinner Walden Two

Source: Walden Two

“"I have been misunderstood" An interview with B. F. Skinner 1972 March/April Center Magazine, pp. 63−65”

B.F. Skinner

“I do not admire myself as a person. My successes do not override my shortcomings.”

B.F. Skinner

Journal of Humanistic Psychology Spring 1991 vol. 31 no. 2 112-113

“The strengthening of behavior which results from reinforcement is appropriately called "conditioning". In operant conditioning we "strengthen" an operant in the sense of making a response more probable or, in actual fact, more frequent.”

B.F. Skinner

Science and Human Behavior (1953).

“It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student's life.”

B.F. Skinner

As quoted in Performance-based Assessment for Middle and High School Physical Education (2002) by Jacalyn Lea Lund and Mary Fortman Kirk, p. 165.

“We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word "admire" then means "marvel at."”

B.F. Skinner book Beyond Freedom and Dignity

Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972).

“Ethical control may survive in small groups, but the control of the population as a whole must be delegated to specialists—to police, priests, owners, teachers, therapists, and so on, with their specialized reinforcers and their codified contingencies.”

B.F. Skinner book Beyond Freedom and Dignity

Beyond Freedom and Dignity, New York: Knopf, 1971 p. 155

“We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.”

B.F. Skinner

As quoted in B. F. Skinner : The Man and His Ideas (1968) by Richard Isadore Evans, p. 73

“The strengthening of behavior which results from reinforcement is appropriately called "conditioning."”

B.F. Skinner

In operant conditioning we "strengthen" an operant in the sense of making a response more probable or, in actual fact, more frequent.
Science and Human Behavior (1953)