We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
B. F. SkinnerRead
Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of fostering happiness and skillfulness in individuals for a productive society.
B.F. Skinner highlights the essential traits that contribute to an individual's well-being and the overall functionality of society. By stating that individuals should be happy, informed, skillful, well-behaved, and productive, Skinner reflects on the importance of nurturing these qualities in people to ensure personal fulfillment and collective progress.
Themes
HappinessSkillfulnessProductivityWell-BeingBehavior
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about personal development, one might quote this to encourage positivity.
More from B. F. Skinner
All quotes βEach of us has interests which conflict the interests of everybody else... 'everybody else' we call 'society'. It's a powerful opponent and it always wins. Oh, here and there an individual prevails for a while and gets what he wants. Sometimes he storms the culture of a society and changes it to his own advantage. But society wins in the long run, for it has the advantage of numbers and of age.
B. F. SkinnerRead
No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been.
B. F. SkinnerRead
I am opposed to the military use of animals. I am also opposed to the military use of men.
B. F. SkinnerRead
The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.
B. F. SkinnerRead
Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.
B. F. SkinnerRead
Similar quotes
What humans want is not just happiness. They want justice; they want meaning.
Martin SeligmanRead
Confidence; as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I love cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.
Haruki MurakamiRead
Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
Ambrose BierceRead
Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day. It is a choice based on the knowledge that we belong to God and have found in God our refuge and our safety and that nothing, not even death, can take God away from us.
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Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling.
Marquis De SadeRead
There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.
Leo TolstoyRead