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.
If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.
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.
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.
We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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.
A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
Overcrowding can be corrected only by inducing people not to crowd, and the environment will continue to deteriorate until polluting practices are abandoned.
Must we wait for selection to solve the problems of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, pollution of the environment and a nuclear holocaust, or can we take explicit steps to make our future more secure? In the latter case, must we not transcend selection?
The one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us – here and now.
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.
We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement.