“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

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is po…" by B.F. Skinner?
B.F. Skinner photo
B.F. Skinner 30
American behaviorist 1904–1990

Related quotes

Henry Mintzberg photo

“We create organizations to serve us, but somehow they also force us to serve them. Sometimes it feels as if our institutions have run out of control, like the machinery of Charlie Chaplin's film Modem Times. Why we should become slaves to our servants… A society of organizations is one in which organizations enter our lives as influential forces in a great many ways — in how we work, what we eat, how we get educated and cured of our illnesses, how we get entertained, and how our ideas are shaped. The ways in which we try to control our organization and our organization in return try to control us become major issues in the lives of all of us.”

Henry Mintzberg (1939) Canadian busines theorist

Henry Mintzberg (1989) Mintzberg on management: inside our strange world of organizations. p. 301. As cited in: R. van den Nieuwenhof (2003) 2 strategie: omgaan met de omgeving. p. 36

Dan Savage photo

“The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that each of us is free to go our own way, even if the ways some of us may choose to go seem sinful or shocking to our fellow citizens.”

Dan Savage book Skipping Towards Gomorrah

Source: Skipping Towards Gomorrah (2002), p. 299

Oliver Wendell Holmes photo

“All of us love companionship and sympathy; some of us may love them too much. All of us are more or less imaginative in our theology.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes book Elsie Venner

Elsie Venner (1859)

Václav Havel photo

“Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)
Context: There appear to be no integrating forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of phenomena in our experience of the world. Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.

James Hudson Taylor photo

“The more we rest on this fact, – that we do not know the way we are going, but that we have a GUIDE who does know; that we do not know how to accomplish our service, but that He never leaves us to devise our own service; – the more restful does our life become.”

James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) Missionary in China

(J. Hudson Taylor. A Ribband of Blue and Other Bible Studies. London: China Inland Mission, n.d., 102).

John Gray photo

“We are not authors of our lives; we are not even part-authors of the events that mark us most deeply. Nearly everything that is most important in our lives is unchosen. The time and place we are born, our parents, the first language we speak - these are chance, not choice. It is the casual drift of things that shapes our most fateful relationships. The life of each of us is a chapter of accidents.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Vices of Morality: The fetish of choice (p. 109-110)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Scott McNealy photo

“[Tech] is unstoppable. We're getting more tech in our lives every day as we go to VR or AR and all of the machine learning and artificial intelligence and all the rest of it.”

Scott McNealy (1954) American businessman

CNBC: "Silicon Valley pioneer Scott McNealy: Tech is 'unstoppable' and part of our lives more than ever" https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/09/silicon-valley-pioneer-scott-mcnealy-tech-is-unstoppable.html (9 February 2018)

Ursula K. Le Guin photo

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

The Operating Instructions in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (2004)

Simon Sinek photo

“Most of us live our lives by accident—we live as it happens. Fullfillment comes when we live our lives on purpose.”

Simon Sinek (1973) British/American author and motivational speaker

Source: Together is Better: A Little Book of Inspiration

James Anthony Froude photo

“All, all nature is harmonious, and must and shall be harmony for ever; even we, poor men, with our wild ways and frantic wrongs, and crimes, and follies, to the beings out beyond us and above us, seem, doubtless, moving on our own way under the broad dominion of universal law. The wretched only feel their wretchedness: in the universe all is beautiful.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Arthur's commentary
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: All, all nature is harmonious, and must and shall be harmony for ever; even we, poor men, with our wild ways and frantic wrongs, and crimes, and follies, to the beings out beyond us and above us, seem, doubtless, moving on our own way under the broad dominion of universal law. The wretched only feel their wretchedness: in the universe all is beautiful. Ay, to those lofty beings, be they who they will, who look down from their starry thrones on the strange figures flitting to and fro over this earth of ours, the wild recklessness of us mortals with each other may well lose its painful interest. Why should our misdoings cause more grief to them than those of the lower animals to ourselves? Pain and pleasure are but forms of consciousness; we feel them for ourselves, and for those who are like ourselves. To man alone the doings of man are wrong; the evil which is with us dies out beyond us; we are but a part of nature, and blend with the rest in her persevering beauty.
Poor consolers are such thoughts, for they are but thoughts, and, alas! our pain we feel.

Related topics