Operant Quotes & Sayings

Anybody with leisure can do that who is willing to begin where everything ought to be begun
that is, at the beginning. Nothing worth calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of any good is life, and the very body of created life, and essential to it, being its self operant, is growth. The larger start you make, the less room you leave for life to extend itself. You fill with the dead matter of your construction the places where assimilation ought to have its perfect work, building by a life-process, self-extending, and subserving the whole. Small beginnings with slow growings have time to root themselves thoroughly
I do not mean in place nor yet in social regard, but in wisdom. Such even prosper by failures, for their failures are not too great to be rectified without injury to the original idea. — George MacDonald

Our capacity for arbitrary relational responding means that functions acquired through operant and/or respondent conditioning can change through relational framing. Something that up till now was neutral for an individual can, through relational responding, suddenly acquire a reinforcing function, or something reinforcing can acquire aversive functions. — Jonas Ramnero

The fundamental problem most patients have is an inability to love themselves, having been unloved by others during some crucial part of their lives. — Bernie Siegel

The Grace of God and the human will are co-operant, but not on equal terms. Grace has the pre-eminence. — William Burton Pope

The human species took a crucial step forward when its vocal musculature came under operant control in the production of speech sounds. Indeed, it is possible that all the distinctive achievements of the species can be traced to that one genetic change. — B.F. Skinner

Who seeks for better of thee, sauce his palate
With thy most operant poison! What is here?
Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods,
I am no idle votarist: roots, you clear heavens!
Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,
Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.
Ha, you gods! why this? what this, you gods? Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads:
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed,
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench: this is it
That makes the wappen'd widow wed again; — William Shakespeare

'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world. — John Burnside

Some patients are still having insomnia, but it's seems worse to them than actually it is. So, if they say they're sleep deprived, they haven't slept at all in three days; if we actually take them into a lab, most of the time we actually do see they're sleeping on and off here and there. — Shelby Harris

There was a heavy, dark pause of vast significance.
Which Jim broke by flashing his hands and belting out, "Booga-wooga!"
At least Eddie laughed. Adrian flipped Jim the bird and headed to the fridge for another beer. — J.R. Ward

My dream is to continue dancing forever. I would kill myself if I didn't dance. — Maddie Ziegler

I don't need a diet pill. I need something that gives you an electric shock when you reach for food. — Joy Behar

My first bit of advice is to not personalize a job loss. The cause for the dismissal was a business calculation. This is difficult for many to grasp; it's difficult to accept that events just occur. Come to see this as an experience. Obviously not the most pleasant experience, but it is one that you'll overcome. — John-Talmage Mathis

Mr. Reagan spent World War II, the global conflict fought and won by his generation, making training films in Hollywood. — R. W. Apple Jr.

The strengthening of behavior which results from reinforcement is appropriately called 'conditioning'. In operant conditioning we 'strengthen' an operant in the sense of making a response more probable or, in actual fact, more frequent. — B.F. Skinner

Of all the chemical transmitter substances sloshing around in your brain, it appears that dopamine may be the most directly related to the neural correlates of belief. Dopamine, in fact, is critical in association learning and the reward system of the brain that Skinner discovered through his process of operant conditioning, whereby any behavior that is reinforced tends to be repeated. A reinforcement is, by definition, something that is rewarding to the organism; that is to say, it makes the brain direct the body to repeat the behavior in order to get another positive reward. — Michael Shermer

Operant conditioning is not confined to deliberate training; it is one way that cats learn how to deal with whatever surroundings they find themselves in. Cats have not (yet) evolved to live in apartments; their instinctive behavior is still tuned to hunting in the open air. — John Bradshaw

We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement. — B.F. Skinner

Work for this world as if you will live forever and work for the here-after as if you will die tomorrow. — Ali Ibn Abi Talib