B. F. Skinner Quotes

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

All governments, without exception, are stable only insofar as they can effectively reward and punish.

Punishment alone governs all created beings.

In government it is order that matters.

The priest accustoms the child to the idea of law, to make it obey better what he calls the "divine law," and the lawyer prates of divine law, that the civil law may be the better obeyed.

There never was a government without force.... A governement leaving it to a man to do his duty, or not, as he pleases, would be a new species of government, or rather no government at all.

who are the brain police?

If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America's political police.

Many men can no more be kept straight by spiritual motives than we can live without policemen.

I know L.A. well, but it's a police state.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

A functioning police state needs no police.

I was the law and order.

The man whose authority is recent is always stern.

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.

Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled, either by a power within them, or by a power without them; either by the word of God, or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible, or by the bayonet.

In the Navy when you say right full rudder and everyone goes right. It's wonderful. In the private sector [and government] no one pays any attention to you.

In keeping people straight, principle is not as powerful as a policeman.

Two things rule the world -- reward and punishment.

Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.

The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.

Religion, superstition, oaths, education, laws, all give way before passions, interest, and power.

Today there's law and order in everything. You can't beat anybody for nothing. If you do beat anyone, it's got to be for the sake of order.