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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

— B. F. Skinner Walden Two (1948)

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Society

More quotes by B. F. Skinner

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

Meditations for Parents Who Do Too Much (1993)

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

It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious.

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

Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis (1969)

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

All B. F. Skinner quotes →

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Daniel Webster

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: B. F. Skinner (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.