On the issue of conscious behavior -
"So far, behaviorism has failed completely to give an adequate or even reasonably plausible account of this trait. In order to understand conscious activity it is necessary to deal with habits, not in isolation, but as elements in adaptive behavior." (Bode, 1929, page 271)

"Behaviorism is not the science of human behavior; it is the philosophy of that science." (Skinner, 1974, pg. 3)

"Human behavior is the most familiar feature of the world in which people live, and more must have been said about it than about any other thing; how much of what has been said is worth saving?" (Skinner, 1974, pg. 3)

Misconceptions about behaviorism according to Skinner -
1. It ignores consciousness, feelings, and states of mind.
2. It neglects innate endowment and argues that all behavior is acquired during the lifetime of the individual.
3. It formulates behavior simply as a set of responses to simuli, thus representing a person as an automaton, robot, puppet, or machine.
4. It does not attempt to account for cognitive processes.
5. It has no place for intention or purpose.
6. It cannot explain creative achievements--in art, for example, or in music, literature, science, or mathematics.
7. It assigns no role to a self or a sense of self.
8. It is necessarily superficial and cannot deal with the depths of the mind or personality.
9. It limits itself to the prediction and control of behavior and misses the essential nature or being of man.
10. It works with animals, particularly with white rats, but not with people, and its picture of human behavior is therefore confined to those features which human beings share with animals.
11. Its achievements under laboratory control cannot be duplicated in daily life, and what it has to say about human behavior in the world at large is therefore unsupported metascience.
12. It is oversimplified and naive and its facts are either trivial or already well known.
13. It is scientistic rather than scientific. It merely emulates the sciences.
14. Its technological achievements could have come about through the use of common sense.
15. If its contentions are valid, they must apply to the behavioral scientist himself, and what he says is therefore only what he has been conditioned to say and cannot be true.
16. It dehumanizes man; it is reductionistic and destroys man qua man.
17. It is concerned only with general principles and therefore neglects the uniqueness of the individual.
18. It is necessarily antidemocratic because the relation between experimenter and subject is manipulative, and its results can therefore be used by dictators but not by men of good will.
19. It regards abstract ideas such as morality and justice as fictions.
20. It is indifferent to the warmth and richness of human life, and it is incompatible with the creation and enjoyment of art, music, and literature and with love for one's fellow men.
"These contentions represent, I belive, an extraordinary misunderstanding of the achievements and significance of a scientific enterprise." (Skinner, 1974, pg. 4-5)

On misconceptions about behavior -
"Any conspicuous event which coincides with human behavior is likely to be seized upon as a cause." (Skinner, 1953, pg. 24)

"Another common practice is to explain behavior in terms of the structure of the individual. The proportion of the body, the shape of the head, the color of the eyes, skin, or hair, the marks on the palms of the hands, and the features of the face have all been said to determine what a man will do." (Skinner, 1953, pg. 25)

"A specific act may never be prediced from physique, but different types of personality imply predispositions to behave in different ways, so that specific acts are presumed to be affected." (Skinner, 1953, pg. 25)

On the effects of "genetic history" on behavior-
"Gross differences in the behavior of different species show that the genetic constitution, whether observed in the body structure of the individual or inferred from a genetic history, is important. But the doctrine of "being born that way" has little to do with demonstrated facts. It is usually an appeal to ignorance." (Skinner, 1953, pg. 26)

On the problem of internal or "inner causes"-
"There is nothing wrong with an inner explanation as such, but events which are located inside a system are likely to be difficult to observe." (Skinner, 1953, pg. 27)

"The practice of looking inside the organism for an explanation of behavior has tended to obscure the variables which are immediately available for a scientific analysis." (Skinner, 1953, pg. 31)

Criticism of Programmed Instruction -
"In more or less close connection with the Pavlovian school of Soviet reflexology (the closeness varying according to individual cases), American psychology has evolved a certain number of theories of learning based on the stimulus-response view. ...The most recent of the great American learning theorists, Skinner, the author of some remarkable experiments with pigeons (a favorite animal for such experimentation had until then been the white rat, which is particularly teachable but unfortunately suspected of degeneracy in its domesticated behavior), adopted a more resolutely positive attitude. ...This being so, Skinner, already in possession of the laws of learning he had either personally verified or evolved, and freed of any general or practical application, observed in the first place that his experiments always worked much better when the interventions of the human experimenter were replaced by efficient mechanical apparatus. In other words, the pigeons produced much more regular reactions when dealing with "teaching machines" capable of applying the stimuli with greater precision and fewer minute variations. Skinner, a teacher by profession as well as a learning theorist, then had the brilliant idea that this observation of his would be equally valid when applied to humans." (Piaget, 1977, pg. 716-717)