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" The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount. "
B. F. Skinner
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" We have not yet seen what man can make of man. "
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" A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment. "
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" Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. "
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" If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment. "
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" Those few people who do respond to the dire conditions of the future - journalists, environmentalists, behavioral scientists - tend not to be powerful. "
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" The environment shapes people's actions. "
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" The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again. "
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" The people who control the condition in which we live have no reason to think beyond more than the next five or 10 years. "
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" I'm very pessimistic. "
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" Great scientific contributions have been techniques. "
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" I don't know whether I want to improve religion or not. I prefer to get rid of it. "
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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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Culture
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" I never really expected to be controversial. "
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Expected
Controversial
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" I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control. "
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Totalitarian
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" The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do. "
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" 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. "
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" Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. "
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" 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. "
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" 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? "
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" Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything. "
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" I think my novel, 'Walden Two,' has made people stop and look at the culture they have inherited and wonder if it is the last word or whether it can be changed. "
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" You can get along very well in this world by simply coming up with a quantity of reasonably valid statements. "
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" I am opposed to the military use of animals. I am also opposed to the military use of men. "
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" 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. "
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" The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" What is sought can never produce the seeking. "
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Never
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" We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. "
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" 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. "
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Trying
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