B.F. Skinner

The consequences of behavior determine the probability of its recurrence.

A person does not act upon the world, the world acts upon him.

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

We are all controlled by the world in which we live, and part of that world has been and will be constructed by men.

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

Man is a machine in the sense that he is a complex system behaving in lawful ways.

Behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences.

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

The way in which we think about the causes of human behavior has changed many times.

A scientific analysis of behavior must, I believe, assume that a person's behavior is determined by his genetic endowment and by his past environmental history.

The problem is to get rid of the causes of behavior, not the behavior itself.

We do not need to destroy a scientific analysis of behavior to preserve a way of life.

The organism is not an empty organism, but an exceedingly complex system, the behavior of which is determined by its genetic endowment and by its past environmental history.

The free man is an illusion.

We are not free to choose as we please.

The only way to make a man behave is to control his environment.

The experimental analysis of behavior is a search for order, for lawful relations, for a science of behavior.

The environment not only selects behavior, it maintains it.

The future of mankind depends on the extent to which we can discover and apply the laws of behavior.

We cannot prove that a given instance of behavior is determined, but we can show that it is lawful.