B. F. Skinner Quotes About Language

We have collected for you the TOP of B. F. Skinner's best quotes about Language! Here are collected all the quotes about Language starting from the birthday of the Psychologist – March 20, 1904! We hope you will be inspired to new achievements with our constantly updated collection of quotes. At the moment, this page contains 15 sayings of B. F. Skinner about Language. We will be happy if you share our collection of quotes with your friends on social networks!
  • 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.

    Education   Doe   May  
    B. F. Skinner (1974). “Walden Two”, p.109, Hackett Publishing
  • Death does not trouble me. I have no fear of supernatural punishments, of course, nor could I enjoy an eternal life in which there would be nothing left for me to do, the task of living having been accomplished.

    Education   Doe  
  • The alphabet was a great invention, which enabled men to store and to learn with little effort what others had learned the hard way-that is, to learn from books rather than from direct, possibly painful, contact with the real world.

  • 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.

    B. F. Skinner (1974). “Walden Two”, p.114, Hackett Publishing
  • Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.

  • A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.

  • 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.

  • An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.

    B. F. Skinner (2014). “Verbal Behavior”, p.145, B. F. Skinner Foundation
  • 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.

  • 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.

    B. F. Skinner (1974). “Walden Two”, p.99, Hackett Publishing
  • 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.

    B. F. Skinner (1974). “Walden Two”, p.116, Hackett Publishing
  • Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.

  • The human species took a crucial step forward when its vocal musculature came under operant control in the production of speech sounds. Indeed, it is possible that all the distinctive achievements of the species can be traced to that one genetic change.

  • 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 Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology Vol. 4". Book edited by Joe L. Kincheloe and Raymond A. Horn, Ch. 99, p. 872 ("Unpacking the Skinner Box : Revisiting B. F. Skinner through a Postformal Lens" by Dana Salter), 2008.
  • We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

    "B. F. Skinner: The Man and His Ideas". Book by Richard Isadore Evans, p. 73, 1968.
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B. F. Skinner

  • Born: March 20, 1904
  • Died: August 18, 1990
  • Occupation: Psychologist