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

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.

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

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.

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

The consequences of an act affect the probability of it's occurring again.

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

If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

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

A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.

Behavior used to be reinforced by great deprivation; if people weren't hungry, they wouldn't work. Now we are committed to feeding people whether they work or not. Nor is money as great a reinforcer as it once was. People no longer work for punitive reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions.

I am opposed to the military use of animals. I am also opposed to the military use of men.

I don't think my mother and father ever had any doubts about what I was to be punished for or not. My parents come from a very strictly defined culture.

I have to tell people that they are not responsible for their behavior. They're not creating it; they're not initiating anything. It's all found somewhere else. That's an awful lot to relinquish.

I won't say that I'm an agnostic, since agnosticism maintains that one cannot know... but I'm not averse to the idea of some intelligence or some organizing force that set up the initial conditions of the universe in such a way that ultimately generated stars, planets and life.

I'm very pessimistic.

If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down.

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?

No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been.

Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.

Reinforcement is being right.

The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned.

The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry.

The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.

We have not yet seen what man can make of man.

When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.

You can get along very well in this world by simply coming up with a quantity of reasonably valid statements.

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

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.

If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.

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.

Every American deserves to live in freedom, to have his or her privacy respected and a chance to go as far as their ability and effort will take them - regardless of race, gender, ethnicity or economic circumstances.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

Achievement is not always success, while reputed failure often is. It is honest endeavor, persistent effort to do the best possible under any and all circumstances.

I came from poverty and was part of those circumstances.

Great joy, especially after a sudden change of circumstances, is apt to be silent, and dwells rather in the heart than on the tongue.

Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances.

Planets are too dim to be detected with existing equipment, far away, except in these very special circumstances where they're seen by their gravitational effect.

Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.

A politics that is not sensitive to the concerns and circumstances of people's lives, a politics that does not speak to and include people, is an intellectually arrogant politics that deserves to fail.

Let everyone regulate his conduct... by the golden rule of doing to others as in similar circumstances we would have them do to us, and the path of duty will be clear before him.

There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.

Libertarians typically argue that particular obligations, at least under normal circumstances, must be created by consent; they cannot be unilaterally imposed by others.

Until fighting ends and there are conditions, which allow the free expression of will by the people, there can be no elections and elections are not held in these circumstances anywhere in the world.

You mustn't forget the circumstances I have been brought up in, the little education I have had.

Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nurtured and live.

To know all about anything is to know how to deal with it under all circumstances.