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

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.

Education is the cornerstone of our communities and our country.

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

I feel that education needs an overhaul - courses are obsolete and grades are on the way out.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

Only time, education and plenty of good schooling will make anti-segregation work.

The education of my brother and myself was of paramount importance to my parents, and in addition to their strong encouragement, they were prepared to make any sacrifice to further our intellectual development.

We have a responsibility to ensure that every individual has the opportunity to receive a high-quality education, from prekindergarten to elementary and secondary, to special education, to technical and higher education and beyond.

Yesterday in this country we had people die of hunger and malnutrition. In some parts of this country, the infant mortality rate rivals that of sub-Saharan Africa. We have a public education system that ranks below that of almost any other Western nation.

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

We spend more than a million dollars a year on our colleges and university, and it is money well spent; but we must have education that fits not the few but the many for the business of life.

Every single major push in education has made it worse and right now it's really bad because everything we've done is de-humanizing education. It's destroying the possibility of the teacher and the student having a warm, friendly, intellectual relationship.

It is only the ignorant who despise education.

The benefits of education and of useful knowledge, generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government.

When the students are occupied, they're not juvenile delinquents. I believe that education is a capital investment.

Don't give up on the child. Give the child an education. Give them daily love.

Education is our greatest opportunity to give an irrevocable gift to the next generation.