The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
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.
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.
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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.
What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
Behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences.
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.
That’s all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
The simplest and most satisfactory view is that thought is simply behavior – verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt. It is not some mysterious process responsible for behavior but the very behavior itself in all the complexity of its controlling relations.
We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
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 self is a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies.
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.
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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.
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.
The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.