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" I don't think my mother and father ever had any doubts about what I was to be punished for or not. My parents come from a very strictly defined culture. "

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" Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. "

" The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone. "

" The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again. "

" I have to tell people that they are not responsible for their behavior. They're not creating it; they're not initiating anything. It's all found somewhere else. That's an awful lot to relinquish. "

" Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful. "

" Even the mundane task of washing dishes by hand is an example of the small tasks and personal activities that once filled people's daily lives with a sense of achievement. "

" I'm very pessimistic. "

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

" 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. "

" Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything. "

" If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment. "

" The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry. "

" You can get along very well in this world by simply coming up with a quantity of reasonably valid statements. "

" No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been. "

" Religions work for their own aggrandizement - strengthen the church and so on - and they use reinforcers of one kind or another to get obedience and so on from their communicants. "

" If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down. "

" I don't know whether I want to improve religion or not. I prefer to get rid of it. "

" When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it. "

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

" Great scientific contributions have been techniques. "

" I don't deny the importance of genetics. However, the fact that I might be altruistic isn't because I have a gene for altruism; the fact that I do something for my children at some cost to myself comes from a history that has operated on me. "

" Behavior used to be reinforced by great deprivation; if people weren't hungry, they wouldn't work. Now we are committed to feeding people whether they work or not. Nor is money as great a reinforcer as it once was. People no longer work for punitive reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions. "

" I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control. "

" The people who control the condition in which we live have no reason to think beyond more than the next five or 10 years. "

" What is sought can never produce the seeking. "

" 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. "

" Reinforcement is being right. "

" I believe that I have been basically anarchistic, anti-religion and anti-industry and business. In other words, anti-bureaucracy. I would like to see people behave well without having to have priests stand by, politicians stand by, or people collecting bills. "

" The environment shapes people's actions. "

" Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. "