Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.
It is not a question of starting. The start has been made. It's a question of what's to be done from now on.
You can get along very well in this world by simply coming up with a quantity of reasonably valid statements.
If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.
We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word 'admire' then means 'marvel at.'
...not everyone is willing to defend a position of 'not knowing.' There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.
The world's a poor standard. any society which is free of hunger and violence looks bright against that background.
The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry.
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.
The people who control the condition in which we live have no reason to think beyond more than the next five or 10 years.
A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
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.
To say that... behaviors have different 'meanings' is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.
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.
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.
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.
Those who have had anything useful to say have said it far too often, and those who have had nothing to say have been no more reticent.
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.
We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.
A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he's often sure he can find one. And that's a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.
Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?
Going out of style isn't a natural process, but a manipulated change which destroys the beauty of last year's dress in order to make it worthless.
A first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.
The juvenile delinquent does not feel his disturbed personality. The intelligent man does not feel his intelligence or the introvert his introversion.
Except when physically restrained, a person is least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment, and unfortunately most people often are.
Those few people who do respond to the dire conditions of the future - journalists, environmentalists, behavioral scientists - tend not to be 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.
It is a surprising fact that those who object most violently to the manipulation of behaviour nevertheless make the most vigorous effort to manipulate minds.
A disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.
Overcrowding can be corrected only by inducing people not to crowd, and the environment will continue to deteriorate until polluting practices are abandoned.
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.
A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process.
A person's genetic endowment, a product of the evolution of the species, is said to explain part of the workings of his mind and his personal history the rest.
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.
Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least.
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.
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.
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.
To require a citizen to sign a loyalty oath is to destroy some of the loyalty he could otherwise claim, since any subsequent loyal behavior may then be attributed to the oath.
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.
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.
The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.
Many social practices essential to the welfare of the species involve the control of one person by another, and no one can suppress them who has any concern for human achievements
Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.
But restraint is the only one sort of control, and absence of restraint isn't freedom. It's not control that's lacking when one feels 'free', but the objectionable control of force.
I may say that the only differences I expect to see revealed between the behavior of the rat and man (aside from enormous differences of complexity) lie in the field of verbal behavior.
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.
The problem of far greater importance remains to be solved. Rather than build a world in which we shall all live well, we must stop building one in which it will be impossible to live at all.