We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
B. F. SkinnerRead
If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.
Interpretation
What this quote means
To preserve resources for future generations, society must limit consumption and the population.
B.F. Skinner's quote emphasizes the urgent need for society to rethink its approach to resource management. It suggests that in order to ensure sustainability, not only should we decrease our consumption habits, but we also need to consider the impact of our population growth on the environment and available resources. This calls for a collective responsibility towards both individual consumption and broader demographic trends that affect resource availability for future generations.
Themes
ResourcesSustainabilityConsumptionPopulationFuture
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in an environmental conference to emphasize the importance of sustainable resource management.
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
So much of the past in encapsulated in the odds and ends. Most of us discard more information about ourselves than we ever care to preserve. Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten. The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.
Sue GraftonRead
Racism in Brazil is well hidden, subtle, and unspoken, underestimated by the media. It is nevertheless extremely violent.
Joaquim BarbosaRead
Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.
Alexander PopeRead
Do you think we enjoy hearing about your brand-new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we're pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You'd last about ten minutes if you were my age these days.
Douglas CouplandRead
For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.
Henri Cartier-BressonRead
An intellectual inferiority of the masses would manifest itself most evidently in their aiming at the abolition of the system in which they themselves are supreme and are served by the elite of the most talented men.
Ludwig Von MisesRead