B. F. Skinner Quotes

I just think I'm better equipped to make a study of human personality than trying to get into the mind of animals.

One thing bothered me as a student. In the 1960s, human behavior was totally off limits for the biologist. There was animal behavior, then there was a long time nothing, after which came human behavior as a totally separate category best left to a different group of scientists.

Psychology is the science of the intellects, characters and behavior of animals including man.

I always compare human beings to animals. It's a nice way to figure out who they are.

It is easier to study the 'behavior' of rats than people, because rats are smaller and have fewer outside commitments. So modern psychology is mostly about rats

Though our conduct seems so very different from that of the higher animals, the primary instincts are much alike in them and in us.

Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either.

Some dogs act like people and some people act like dogs.

Perhaps measuring animal intelligence by comparing it to human intelligence isn't the best litmus test.

The restriction of studies of human intellect and character to studies of conscious states was not without influence on a scientific studies of animal psychology.

If a cat does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing, for the same reason, we call it intelligence.

There is one radical distinction between different minds … that some minds are stronger and apter to mark the difference of things, others to mark their resemblances.

History is the zoology of the human race.

If you spend enough time around something like baboons, you start to look at humans differently.

I am always incorrigibly interested in the behaviour of the 'human animal', and look forward to perusing divers effusions of your lively pen.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.

Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass.

What is denominated discretion in man we call cunning in brutes.

Animals have personalities like people and must be studied.

Personally, I don't deal much in theory. I have to deal with the facts. And on the basis of facts, I don't see much difference in the behavior of men and women.

The chimpanzees taught me a lot about nonverbal communication. The big difference between them and us is that they don't have spoken language. Everything else is almost the same: Kissing, embracing, swaggering, shaking the fist.

There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B. F. Skinner.

I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.

The chief difference between horror fans and science fiction fans lies in why they won't walk backwards. A horror fan won't walk backwards because he knows he'll be knifed by a madman. A science fiction fan won't walk backwards because he knows he'll step on the cat.

If you confine yourself to this Skinnerian technique, you study nothing but the learning apparatus and you leave out everything that is different in octopi, crustaceans, insects and vertebrates. In other words, you leave out everything that makes a pigeon a pigeon, a rat a rat, a man a man, and, above all, a healthy man healthy and a sick man sick.