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.
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.