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" 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. "

B. F. Skinner

Way

Ideal

Environment

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" The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned. "

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" 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. "

" Reinforcement is being right. "

" Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. "

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

" I remember when I was a freshman in college, I was still somewhat bothered by... worried... about religion. I remember going to this professor of philosophy and telling him that I had lost my faith. "

" 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. "

" I am opposed to the military use of animals. I am also opposed to the military use of men. "

" 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? "

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

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" I never really expected to be controversial. "

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

" The environment shapes people's actions. "

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

" 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. "

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

B. F. Skinner

Important

Out

" A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Those few people who do respond to the dire conditions of the future - journalists, environmentalists, behavioral scientists - tend not to be powerful. "