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.

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.

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

I do not admire myself as a person. My successes do not override my shortcomings.

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. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious. It is a difficult assignment. The conditions the teacher arranges must be powerful enough to compete with those under which the student tends to behave in distracting ways.

It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.

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.

We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word "admire" then means "marvel at."

Ethical control may survive in small groups, but the control of the population as a whole must be delegated to specialists-to police, priests, owners, teachers, therapists, and so on, with their specialized reinforcers and their codified contingencies.

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

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

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

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

The strengthening of behavior which results from reinforcement is appropriately called "conditioning". In operant conditioning we "strengthen" an operant in the sense of making a response more probable or, in actual fact, more frequent.

Man's power appears to have increased out of all proportion to his wisdom. He has never been in a better position to build a healthy, happy, and productive world; yet things have perhaps never seemed so black.

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.