B. F. Skinner Quotes

At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the most destructive and creative of species.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

The true science and study of man is man.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

The intelligence which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able to do something towards curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men.

Sometimes things can take a very long time and still not be very good. It took us all of evolutionary history just to get where we are today, for instance, and mostly where we are today is on the couch.

Technology changes all the time; human nature, hardly ever.

Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature.

As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.

We're not inherently anything but human.

I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape.

Human Nature is the only science of man; and yet has been hitherto the most neglected.

We can't legislate human nature.

The history of mankind is confined within a limited period, and from every quarter brings an intimation that human affairs have had a beginning.

There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.

When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

In general, the human race is still a young organism.

As humans become civilized, the survival rate of the lazy, botched and dim-witted grow in inverse proportion to the productive segment since nature can no longer remove them from the species.

History is the zoology of the human race.

As nine months go to the shaping an infant ripe for his birth, So many a million of ages have gone to the making of man

I've written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

I think almost everything about humans and human civilization is explained better by evolution than anything else.