Top 80 B. F. Skinner Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

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

— B. F. Skinner

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

— B. F. Skinner

4. “That’s all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.”

— B. F. Skinner

5. “Behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences.”

— B. F. Skinner

6. “Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.”

— B. F. Skinner

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

— B. F. Skinner

8. “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

9. “The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.”

— B. F. Skinner

10. “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

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

— B. F. Skinner

12. “A first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.”

— B. F. Skinner

13. “The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.”

— B. F. Skinner

14. “Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.”

— B. F. Skinner

15. “The juvenile delinquent does not feel his disturbed personality. The intelligent man does not feel his intelligence or the introvert his introversion.”

— B. F. Skinner

16. “Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.”

— B. F. Skinner

17. “An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.”

— B. F. Skinner

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

— B. F. Skinner

19. “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

20. “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

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

— B. F. Skinner

22. “The simplest and most satisfactory view is that thought is simply behavior – verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt. It is not some mysterious process responsible for behavior but the very behavior itself in all the complexity of its controlling relations.”

— B. F. Skinner

23. “I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.”

— B. F. Skinner

24. “If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.”

— B. F. Skinner

25. “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

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

— B. F. Skinner

27. “A self is a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies.”

— B. F. Skinner

28. “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

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

— B. F. Skinner

30. “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

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31. “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.”

— B. F. Skinner

32. “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

33. “We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.”

— B. F. Skinner

34. “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.”

— B. F. Skinner

35. “We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement.”

— B. F. Skinner

36. “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

37. “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

38. “Society already possesses the psychological techniques needed to obtain universal observance of a code – a code which would guarantee the success of a community or state. The difficulty is that these techniques are in the hands of the wrong people-or, rather, there aren’t any right people.”

— B. F. Skinner

39. “I’ve often said that my rats have taught me much more than I’ve taught them.”

— B. F. Skinner

40. “Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.”

— B. F. Skinner

41. “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

42. “The one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us – here and now.”

— B. F. Skinner

43. “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. 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

44. “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.”

— B. F. Skinner

45. “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

46. “Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?”

— B. F. Skinner

47. “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.”

— B. F. Skinner

48. “The human species took a crucial step forward when its vocal musculature came under operant control in the production of speech sounds. Indeed, it is possible that all the distinctive achievements of the species can be traced to that one genetic change.”

— B. F. Skinner

49. “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

50. “The world’s a poor standard. any society which is free of hunger and violence looks bright against that background.”

— B. F. Skinner