B. F. Skinner quotes

B. F. Skinner was an influential American psychologist and behaviorist best known for his work on operant conditioning. His experiments with animals and the invention of the Skinner box advanced the scientific study of behavior. He fundamentally shaped modern psychology and theories of learning. Here are 68 of his quotes:

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

B. F. Skinner

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

B. F. Skinner

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

B. F. Skinner

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

B. F. Skinner

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

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

B. F. Skinner

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

B. F. Skinner

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

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

B. F. Skinner

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

B. F. Skinner

If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that's necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.

B. F. Skinner

At this very moment enormous numbers of intelligent men and women of goodwill are trying to build a better world. But problems are born faster than they can be solved.

B. F. Skinner

It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student's life.

B. F. Skinner

The strengthening of behavior which results from reinforcement is appropriately called "conditioning". In operant conditioning we "strengthen" an operant in the sense of making a response more probable or, in actual fact, more frequent.

B. F. Skinner

It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.

B. F. Skinner

Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived", but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious. It is a difficult assignment. The conditions the teacher arranges must be powerful enough to compete with those under which the student tends to behave in distracting ways.

B. F. Skinner

No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn't die out, it's wiped out.

B. F. Skinner

What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.

B. F. Skinner

Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.

B. F. Skinner

The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.

B. F. Skinner

We have not yet seen what man can make of man.

B. F. Skinner

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

B. F. Skinner