Gregory Bateson Quotes

Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.

Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.

Members of weakly religious families get, of course, no religious training from any source outside the family.

Multiple descriptions are better than one.

What is true is that the idea of power corrupts. Power corrupts most rapidly those who believe in it, and it is they who will want it most. Obviously, our democratic system tends to give power to those who hunger for it and gives every opportunity to those who don't want power to avoid getting it. Not a very satisfactory arrangement if power corrupts those who believe in it and want it.

Synaptic summation is the technical term used in neurophysiology for those instances in which some neuron C is fired only by a combination of neurons A and B.

Number is different from quantity. This difference is basic for any sort of theorizing in behavioral science, any sort of imagining of what goes on between organisms or inside organisms as part of their processes of thought.

Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.

It takes two to know one.

Creative thought must always contain a random component.

Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.

A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.

In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.

The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.

It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.

It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future.

After mastery comes artistry and not before.

Science probes; it does not prove.

I shall argue that the problem of grace is fundamentally a problem of integration and what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind - especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called 'consciousness' and the other the 'unconscious'

Play is the establishment and exploration of relationship.

Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.

There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong.

In no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are imminent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole.

Whatever the ups and downs of detail within our limited experience, the larger whole is primarily beautiful.

No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.

The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.

Evolution has long been badly taught. In particular, students - and even professional biologists - acquire theories of evolution without any deep understanding of what problem these theories attempt to solve. They learn but little of the evolution of evolutionary theory.

The wise legislator will only rarely initiate a new rule of behaviour; more usually he will confine himself to affirming in law what has already become the custom of the people.

Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.

The map is not the territory (coined by Alfred Korzybski), and the name is not the thing named.

But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?

Numbers are the product of counting. Quantities are the product of measurement. This means that numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next. Between two and three there is a jump. In the case of quantity, there is no such jump; and because jump is missing in the world of quantity, it is impossible for any quantity to be exact. You can have exactly three tomatoes. You can never have exactly three gallons of water. Always quantity is approximate.

The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.

It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems.

Some tools of thought are so blunt that they are almost useless; others are so sharp that they are dangerous. But the wise man will have the use of both kinds.

Wisdom is the intelligence of the system as a whole.

The world is indeed only a small tide pool; disturb one part and the rest is threatened.

Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.

We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future.

Numbers are the product of counting. Quantities are the product of measurement. This means that numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next.

There are times when I catch myself believing that there is such a thing as something; which is separate from something else.

Information is a difference that makes a difference.

There are many matters and many circumstances in which consciousness is undesirable and silence is golden, so that secrecy can be used as a marker to tell us that we are approaching the holy.

Interesting phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another.

We are discovering today that several of the premises which are deeply ingrained in our way of life are simply untrue and become pathogenic when implemented with modern technology.

The only way out is spiritual, intellectual, and emotional revolution in which, finally, we learn to experience first hand the interloping connections between person and person, organism and organism, action and consequence.

All experience is subjective.

Logic can often be reversed, but the effect does not precede the cause.