B. F. Skinner

I never really expected to be controversial.

Reinforcement is being right.

Even the mundane task of washing dishes by hand is an example of the small tasks and personal activities that once filled people's daily lives with a sense of achievement.

I don't know whether I want to improve religion or not. I prefer to get rid of it.

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

What is sought can never produce the seeking.

I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.

I'm very pessimistic.

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

Great scientific contributions have been techniques.

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

I remember when I was a freshman in college, I was still somewhat bothered by... worried... about religion. I remember going to this professor of philosophy and telling him that I had lost my faith.

I don't deny the importance of genetics. However, the fact that I might be altruistic isn't because I have a gene for altruism; the fact that I do something for my children at some cost to myself comes from a history that has operated on me.

The people who control the condition in which we live have no reason to think beyond more than the next five or 10 years.

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

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.

Religions work for their own aggrandizement - strengthen the church and so on - and they use reinforcers of one kind or another to get obedience and so on from their communicants.

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 believe that I have been basically anarchistic, anti-religion and anti-industry and business. In other words, anti-bureaucracy. I would like to see people behave well without having to have priests stand by, politicians stand by, or people collecting bills.

I think my novel, 'Walden Two,' has made people stop and look at the culture they have inherited and wonder if it is the last word or whether it can be changed.

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.

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

The environment shapes people's actions.

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

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