The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.

Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.

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 what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

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

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?

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

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

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

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.

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 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.