16 Quotes & Sayings By B F Skinner

B. F. Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania to a well-to-do family. He was the first child of a minister and a teacher Read more

In his youth, he was a promising student and athlete, but he suffered from a tubercular lung and was forced to drop out of high school at age 16. Three years later, at age 18, he entered Harvard University as an undergraduate, but he left after one year because of poor grades and behavioral problems. He spent the next few years working as a lab assistant and an instructor at an institution for mentally retarded children near Boston.

In 1926, Skinner was accepted into Harvard's Graduate School of Psychology and received his PhD in 1930. The next year he began work as an instructor at Harvard and began his famous studies on the relationship between behavior and external reinforcement schedules.

1
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
2
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
3
We shouldn't teach great books we should teach a love of reading. B. F. Skinner
4
I won't say that I'm an agnostic, since agnosticism maintains that one cannot know... but I'm not averse to the idea of some intelligence or some organizing force that set up the initial conditions of the universe in such a way that ultimately generated stars, planets and life. B. F. Skinner
5
If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment. B. F. Skinner
6
I don't know whether I want to improve religion or not. I prefer to get rid of it. B. F. Skinner
7
A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment. B. F. Skinner
8
The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount. B. F. Skinner
9
Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful. B. F. Skinner
10
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
11
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do. B. F. Skinner
12
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. B. F. Skinner
13
Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. B. F. Skinner
14
If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down. B. F. Skinner
15
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