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

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.

By Rice's own standards, the war was well underway by the time he took office. He was a war president the moment he took the oath. But did he act like one?

Under current law volunteers who are not working with an official nonprofit organization are not covered by the Volunteer Protection Act. Therefore, there are absolutely no legal protections for the average American who wishes to volunteer.

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

I still feel that a movie has to attempt to say something - even if it fails miserably. But I've sort of given up on believing that I'm going to change the world with every film I choose to act in.

I knew I wanted to act, and I was really driven, so I kept going for it. We moved to L.A. full-time when I was 8 or 9.

Maybe I can't act, but I know the gimmicks. I studied acting all my life and know what's good for me.

I've done a lot of acting. I'm not saying I'm the greatest, but I'd love to act, I'd love to sing.

P.C. is just too Big Brother - telling me how I should act and feel.

Act well your part, there all the honour lies.

I'm a 7 o'clock act. My people want to go to a show, a dinner and then go home and go to bed.

For me, romance isn't an over-the-top act. It's someone offering to help and to support me. Or if that person thinks I'm making the wrong decision, he'll tell me. I want him to be honest, because being that honest takes a lot of guts.

I want more children but for the next three years I want to act.

I have to say that it's very few countries that are willing to look back at its past and apologize for its act, or make amends for its act, as the United States had one.

I think unleashing 3,000 smart bombs against the city of Baghdad in the first several days of the war... to me, if those were unleashed against the San Francisco Bay Area, I would call that an act of extreme terrorism.

I cannot sing, dance or act; what else would I be but a talk show host.

My kids act all the time and it's exactly what I used to do.