B. F. Skinner Quotes

The majority of people don't want to plan. They want to be free of the responsibility of planning. What they ask for is merely some assurance that they will be decently provided for. The rest is a day-to-day enjoyment of life. That's the explanation for your Father Divines; people naturally flock to anyone they can trust for the necessities of life... They are the backbone of a community — solid, trust-worthy, essential.

Your liberals and radicals all want to govern. They want to try it their way — to show that people will be happier if the power is wielded in a different way or for different purposes. But how do they know? Have they ever tried it? No, it's merely their guess.

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.

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

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

In a world of complete economic equality, you get and keep the affections you deserve. You can’t buy love with gifts or favors, you can’t hold love by raising an inadequate child, and you can’t be secure in love by serving as a good scrub woman or a good provider.

Once in a while a new government initiates a program to put power to better use, but its success or failure never really proves anything. In science, experiments are designed, checked, altered, repeated — but not in politics... We have no real cumulative knowledge. History tells us nothing. That's the tragedy of a political reformer.

If there is any purpose or direction in the evolution of a culture, it has to do with bringing people under the control of more and more of the consequences of their behaviour.

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. It enslaves him almost before he has tasted freedom. The 'ologies' will tell you how its done Theology calls it building a conscience or developing a spirit of selflessness. Psychology calls it the growth of the superego.

Considering how long society has been at it, you'd expect a better job. But the campaigns have been badly planned and the victory has never been secured.

The hero is a device which the historian has taken over from the layman. He uses it because he has no scientific vocabulary or technique for dealing with the real facts of history — the opinions, emotions, attitudes; the wishes, plans, schemes; the habits of men. He can't talk about them so he talks about heroes.

La fortuna también se gana a expensas de los demás. Aun los honores bien merecidos del científico o erudito son injustos para muchas personas con iguales merecimientos que nunca reciben ninguno. Cuando se coloca a unhombre en un pedestal, se relega a otros hombres a la oscuridad. Desde el punto de vista colectivo no hay ganancia en absoluto y quizá sí una pérdida.

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

It is a mistake to suppose that all change or development is growth. The present condition of the earth’s surface is not mature or immature; the horse has not, so far as we know, reached some final and presumably optimal stage in evolutionary development. If a child’s language seems to grow like an embryo, it is only because the environmental contingencies have been neglected. The feral child has no language, not because his isolation has interfered with some growth process, but because he has not been exposed to a verbal community. We have no reason to call any culture mature in the sense that further growth is unlikely or that it would necessarily be a kind of deterioration. We call some cultures underdeveloped or immature in contrast with others we call ‘advanced’, but it is a crude form of jingoism to imply that any government, religion, or economic system is mature.

The main objection to the metaphor of growth, in considering either the development of an individual or the evolution of a culture, is that it emphasizes a terminal state which does not have a function. We say that an organism grows toward maturity or in order to reach maturity. Maturity becomes a goal, and progress becomes movement towards a goal. A goal is literally a terminus — the end of something such as a foot race. It has no effect on the race except to bring it to an end. The word is used in this relatively empty sense when we say that the goal of life is death or that the goal of evolution is to fill the earth with life. Death is no doubt the end of life, and a full world may be the end of evolution, but these terminal conditions have no bearing on the processes through which they are reached. We do not live in order to die, and evolution does not proceed in order to fill the earth with life.

The tender sentiment of the 'one and only' has less to do with constancy of heart than with singleness of opportunity.

I would have been glad to agree to let them all proceed henceforth in complete ignorance of psychology, if they would forget my opinion of chocolate sodas or the story of the amusing episode on a Spanish streetcar.