B. F. Skinner Quotes

What if the counterculture was only a stumbling beginning, rather than the best that could be hoped for?

I can create institutions, but I can't rewrite the chips in people's heads.

Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.

The typical journalist's typical lead for the typical Canadian story nowadays is along this line: that Canadians are hard at work trying to gain a reputation as a nation of rapid social change.

The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.

You cannot change the psychology of a people by a coup d'etat, or by some quick process of political chemistry convert an idle nobleman into a serious worker, or a medical student into a full-blown statesman.

… utopian social engineering

The period of radical reform is finished.

Cultural change always precedes political change.

I've often used the extremes in my work to comment on the mainstream. I think that sometimes a subject that I'm working on, like popular culture, is so present all around us that they're hard to see. It's like: How do you see the air you breathe? How do you see how it affects you?

Using political tools to change social conditions won't work.

You might as well try and dam Niagara Falls with toothpicks as to stop the reform wave sweeping our land.

The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.

Here we were supposedly changing the world for the better in the Sixties, but as we get 40 years further down the line, we realise that some of those changes such as the drugs probably weren't all that great or sensible. It was all about social experiments.

Culture does matter, but politics can change culture.

Men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.

Man is as the Lord made him. But we can change our institutions.

I want to be known as a catalyst for change.

Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement of the people has worked down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, it carried up the heaving, cloggy mass.

A society needs famous people; the question is whom it chooses for that role. Any criticism of its choice is by implication a criticism of that society.

I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms. In America, possibly because of whatever the American dream is, this happens over and over again. These eras repeat.

I want a real revolution, a real change in society: society, a great organic mass of well-regulated forces used for the bringing-about a happy life for all.

Satire doesn't effect change.

When I grew up, in the time of 'Look Back in Anger,' the theatre was very exciting, a place where you felt that social comment could lead to social change.

Revolutions are all based on the false idea that humans and their nature can be changed.