B. F. Skinner

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.

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

The tender sentiment of the ‘one and only’ has less to do with constancy of heart than with singleness of opportunity.

B. F. Skinner

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

B. F. Skinner

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.

B. F. Skinner

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.

B. F. Skinner

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.

B. F. Skinner

Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.

B. F. Skinner

Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?

B. F. Skinner

We cannot prove, of course, that human behavior as a whole is fully determined, but the proposition becomes more plausible as facts accumulate, and I believe that a point has been reached at which its implications must be seriously considered.

B. F. Skinner