"I was lucky in the ‘60s to also be taking a class in Classical Ethology by a professor named Tom Evans, where I learned that operant conditioning does not explain all animal behavior. He explained how fixed action patterns and hardwired instinctual behavior works. And I remember going on a visit to Dr. Skinner and I felt like I was visiting, you know, the grand temple of psychology. And I went up to his office and, you know, he seemed, I'm like, "oh, you mean he's actually an ordinary person?" And we got to talking and of course back then I wore a dress you know ‘cause, you know, ladies had to be, like, dressed up, and I had a very conservative dress on, and B.F. Skinner touched my legs. And I said "You may look at them, but you may not touch them" and that ended that. And that is as he was showing me around the rat lab, I said "Dr. Skinner if we can just learn about the brain then we really would know some things". And Dr. Skinner says to me "We don't need to know anything about the brain, we have operant conditioning". And I just never really could accept that. You know, especially after taking Tom Evans' class at the same time."

"Suppose that an engineer is presented with a device whose functioning he does not understand, and suppose that through experiment he can obtain information about input-output relations of this device. He would not hesitate, if rational, to construct a theory of the internal states of the device and to test it against further evidence. ... By objecting, a priori, to this research strategy, Skinner merely condemns his strange variety of “behavioral science” to continued ineptitude."

"I loved my father dearly. He was fantastically devoted and affectionate. But perhaps the stories about me would never have started if he had done a better job with his public image. He believed that, although our genes determine who we are, it is mostly our environment that shapes our personality. A Time magazine cover story ran the headline "BF Skinner says we can't afford freedom". All he had said was that controls are an everyday reality — traffic lights and a police force, for instance — and that we need to organise our social structures in ways that create more positive controls and fewer aversive ones. As is clear from his utopian novel, Walden Two, the furthest thing from his mind was a totalitarian or fascist state. His careless descriptions of the aircrib might have contributed to the public's common misconception as well. He was too much the scientist and too little the self-publicist — especially hazardous when you are already a controversial figure."

"I have heard the lies before, but seeing them in black and white in a respected Sunday newspaper felt as if somebody had punched me hard in the stomach. Admittedly, the facts of my unusual upbringing sound dodgy: esteemed psychologist BF Skinner, who puts rats and pigeons in experimental boxes to study their behaviour, also puts his baby daughter in a box. This is good fodder for any newspaper. ... The early rumours were simple, unembellished: I had gone crazy, sued my father, committed suicide. My father would come home from lecture tours to report that three people had asked him how his poor daughter was getting on. I remember family friends returning from Europe to relate that somebody they had met there had told them I had died the year before. The tale, I later learned, did the rounds of psychology classes across America. One shy schoolmate told me years later that she had shocked her college psychology professor, who was retelling the rumour about me, by banging her fist on her desk, standing up and shouting, "She's not crazy!" Slater's sensationalist book rehashes some of the old stuff, but offers some rumours that are entirely new to me. ... My early childhood, it's true, was certainly unusual — but I was far from unloved. I was a much cuddled baby. Call it what you will, the "aircrib" ,"baby box", "heir conditioner" (not my father's term) was a wonderful alternative to the cage-like cot. My father's intentions were simple, and based on removing what he and my mother saw as the worst aspects of a baby's typical sleeping arrangements: clothes, sheets and blankets. These not only have to be washed, but they restrict arm and leg movement and are a highly imperfect method of keeping a baby comfortable."

"Today behaviourists like Skinner imprison the very concept of man within the limits of what they conclude from their artificial tests with animals."

"I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is."

"It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student's life."

"The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount."

"I do not admire myself as a person. My successes do not override my shortcomings."

"Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived", but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious. It is a difficult assignment. The conditions the teacher arranges must be powerful enough to compete with those under which the student tends to behave in distracting ways."

"It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled."

"A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment."

"We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word "admire" then means "marvel at.""

"Ethical control may survive in small groups, but the control of the population as a whole must be delegated to specialists—to police, priests, owners, teachers, therapists, and so on, with their specialized reinforcers and their codified contingencies."

"The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man."

"We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement."

"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."

"Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive."

"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."

"Man's power appears to have increased out of all proportion to his wisdom. He has never been in a better position to build a healthy, happy, and productive world; yet things have perhaps never seemed so black."

"Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner."

"Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility."

"[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have."

"Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant."

"Randomness works well in search—sometimes better than humans."

"When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free."

"Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system."

"This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ..."

"There is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)—likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher ..."

"It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement."

"The antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility—and sacrifice—of the lower one."

"He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once."

"It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us—and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits."

"Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury."

"If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead."

"The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country."

"Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort."

"Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it."

"If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one."

"It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself."

"Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don't even have a name for."

"The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much."

"Compromising is condoning. The only modern dictum I follow one by George Santayana: A man is morally free when... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation."

"Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice; being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it."

"If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud."

"Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese."

"Simplicity is not so simple to attain."

"We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience."

"I want to live happily in a world I don't understand."

"To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly."