An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.
Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
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.
Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli.
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.
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.
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.
The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.
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. 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.
Except when physically restrained, a person is least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment, and unfortunately most people often are.
Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.
Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.
Men build society and society builds men.
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.
If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.
Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.
Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.
The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.