Behaviorism Quotes:

The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that.

- Alfie Kohn

topic: Legacy, Behaviorism

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.

- B. F. Skinner

topic: Education, Perseverance, Real, Failure In Life, Do Not Give Up

Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.

- B. F. Skinner

topic: Education, Children, Giving, Behaviorism

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

- B. F. Skinner

source: "Meditations for Parents Who Do Too Much". Book by Jonathon Lazear and Wendy Lazear, p. 5, 1993.

topic: Reality, Important, Way, Reinforcement, Positive Reinforcement

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select--doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.

- John B. Watson

topic: Artist, Doctors, Race, Merchants, Nature Vs Nurture

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.

- B. F. Skinner

topic: Education, Views, Mysterious, Behaviorism, Nonverbal

If we ever do end up acting just like rats or Pavlov's dogs, it will be largely because behaviorism has conditioned us to do so.

- Richard Rosen

topic: Dog, Acting, Behaviour, Pavlov, Behaviorism

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.

- B. F. Skinner

source: "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.

topic: Education, Reality, Design, Behaviorism

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

topic: Education, Understanding, Way, Wrong Way, Behaviorism

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

- B. F. Skinner

source: New Scientist 21 May 1964

topic: Graduation, Education, Teacher, Math Education, Inspirational Graduation

Behaviorism proposes to study human behavior according to the methods developed by animal and infant psychology. It seeks to investigate reflexes and instincts, automatisms and unconscious reactions. But it has told us nothing about the reflexes that have built cathedrals, railroads, and fortresses, the instincts that have produced philosophies, poems, and legal systems, the automatisms that have resulted in the growth and decline of empires, the unconscious reactions that are splitting atoms.

- Ludwig von Mises

topic: Philosophy, Animal, Psychology, Splitting The Atom, Behaviorism

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

- B. F. Skinner

source: "The Man and His Ideas". Book by Richard Isadore Evans (p. 73), 1968.

topic: Inspiring, Education, Book, Joy Of Reading, Libraries And Reading

Of course, Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

- W. H. Auden

source: A CertainWorld "Behaviorism" (1970)

topic: Funny, Science, Simple, Down To Earth, Appliances

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

topic: Education, Men, Genius, Behaviorism

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

topic: Education, Baby, Curiosity, Behaviorism

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

- B. F. Skinner

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

topic: Education, Important, Skins, Behaviorism

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.

- B. F. Skinner

topic: Education, Doe, May, Fourth Grade, Sixth Grade

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.

- B. F. Skinner

topic: Education, Honesty, Intellectual, Intellectual Honesty, Behaviorism

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.

- B. F. Skinner

topic: Education, Achievement, Sound, Productions, Behaviorism

Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.

- B. F. Skinner

source: B. F. Skinner (1974). “Walden Two”, p.116, Hackett Publishing

topic: Men, Genius, Chaos, Behaviorism

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.

- B. F. Skinner

topic: Education, World, Impossible, Behaviorism

Some have said that the thesis [of indeterminacy] is a consequence of my behaviorism. Some have said that it is a reductio ad absurdum of my behaviorism. I disagree with this second point, but I agree with the first. I hold further that the behaviorism approach is mandatory. In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice.

- Willard Van Orman Quine

topic: Choices, Psychology, May, Behaviorism

Think of all the nonsense you had to learn in psychology courses. None of which was testable. None of which was measurable. We had behaviorism, Freudian psychology, all of these theories that you learn in psychology. Totally untestable. Now, we can test it, because physics allows us to calculate energy flows in the brain.

- Michio Kaku

topic: Thinking, Psychology, Brain, Energy Flow, Behaviorism

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select-doctor, lawyer, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

- John B

topic: Learning, Science, Men, Merchants, Behaviorism

... causes (pains) are not logical constructions out of their effects (behaviour).

- Hilary Putnam

topic: Pain, Behaviour, Causes, Behaviorism

Evolution is the root of atheism, of communism, nazism, behaviorism, racism, economic imperialism, militarism, libertinism, anarchism, and all manner of anti-Christian systems of belief and practice.

- Henry M. Morris

topic: Christian, Practice, Roots, Anti Christian, Behaviorism

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.

- B. F. Skinner

topic: Punishment, Doe, Tasks, Behaviorism

You do research into specific occupations of the character, with specific behaviorisms that their daily life might give them. You do as much research as you want, as you can. Now that you have such open access to the Internet, it's very easy to do so.

- Guy Burnet

source: "Guy Burnet, Mortdecai Actor: On Boxing Every Day and Staying Balanced". Interview with Robert Piper, www.marandapleasantmedia.com. January 27, 2015.

topic: Character, Giving, Might, Behaviorism