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

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.

There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't.

I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.

I was drawn to boxing because I got beat up as a kid. I was the kid with the piano books in a New York neighbourhood.

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

The proper study of mankind is books.

I have written about 10 books, all just practical encouragement for moms.

Whites were the winners, blacks were the losers, we wrote the history books, and they didn't feature.

Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.

Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist.

As I have studied the Bible and the Book of Mormon, I have come to know through the power of the Spirit of God, that these books contain the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books.

Then I found books that were written much later, as late as 15 years ago. It was very superficial material, but enough to tell me that the genesis of this story was worth exploring.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.