Top 74 Gregory Bateson Quotes
#1. Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
Gregory Bateson
#2. We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future.
Gregory Bateson
#3. Perhaps the attempt to achieve grace by identification with the animals was the most sensitive thing which was tried in the whole bloody history of religion .
Gregory Bateson
#5. Members of weakly religious families get, of course, no religious training from any source outside the family.
Gregory Bateson
#6. 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.
Gregory Bateson
#7. A major difficulty is that the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is partly a product of the answers that we already have given to the riddle in its various forms.
Gregory Bateson
#8. The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
Gregory Bateson
#9. Most of us have lost that sense of unity of biosphere and humanity which would bind and reassure us all with an affirmation of beauty. Most of us do not today believe that whatever the ups and down of detail within our limited experience, the larger whole is primarily beautiful.
Gregory Bateson
#10. 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.
Gregory Bateson
#11. It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
Gregory Bateson
#12. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time.
Gregory Bateson
#13. The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
Gregory Bateson
#15. Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.
Gregory Bateson
#16. If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will ramify throughout his whole universe.
Gregory Bateson
#18. When we think of coconuts or pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain.
Gregory Bateson
#19. 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.
Gregory Bateson
#20. Rather, for all objects and experiences, there is a quantity that has optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived.
Gregory Bateson
#21. Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.
Gregory Bateson
#22. There are times when I catch myself believing that there is such a thing as something; which is separate from something else.
Gregory Bateson
#23. Information consists of differences that make a difference.
Gregory Bateson
#24. Without context words and actions have no meaning at all
Gregory Bateson
#25. Things have to be done fast in America , and therefore therapy has to be brief.
Gregory Bateson
#26. We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
Gregory Bateson
#28. 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.
Gregory Bateson
#29. The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of
course you never do.
Gregory Bateson
#30. In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
Gregory Bateson
#31. Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
Gregory Bateson
#32. 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'
Gregory Bateson
#33. The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think
Gregory Bateson
#34. A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
Gregory Bateson
#35. 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.
Gregory Bateson
#37. 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.
Gregory Bateson
#38. The meaning of your communication is the response you get.
Gregory Bateson
#39. Money is always transitively valued. More money is supposedly always better than less money.
Gregory Bateson
#40. If we pursue this matter further, we shall be told that the stable object is unchanging under the impact or stress of some particular external or internal variable or, perhaps, that it resists the passage of time.
Gregory Bateson
#41. Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics.
Gregory Bateson
#42. 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.
Gregory Bateson
#43. 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.
Gregory Bateson
#44. Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
Gregory Bateson
#45. 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.
Gregory Bateson
#47. Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
Gregory Bateson
#48. It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.
Gregory Bateson
#49. 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.
Gregory Bateson
#50. Play is the establishment and exploration of relationship.
Gregory Bateson
#51. Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.
Gregory Bateson
#53. Prediction can never be absolutely valid and therefore science can never prove some generalization or even test a single descriptive statement and in that way arrive at final truth.
Gregory Bateson
#54. Logic can often be reversed, but the effect does not precede the cause.
Gregory Bateson
#55. The world is indeed only a small tide pool; disturb one part and the rest is threatened.
Gregory Bateson
#58. The map is not the territory (coined by Alfred Korzybski), and the name is not the thing named.
Gregory Bateson
#60. We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.
Gregory Bateson
#61. People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
Gregory Bateson
#62. Thirty years ago, we used to ask: Can a computer simulate all processes of logic? The answer was yes, but the question was surely wrong. We should have asked: Can logic simulate all sequences of cause and effect? And the answer would have been no.
Gregory Bateson
#63. Perhaps there is no such thing as unilateral power. After all, the man in power depends on receiving information all the time from outside. He responds to that information just as much as he causes things to happen ... it is an interaction, and not a lineal situation.
Gregory Bateson
#64. 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.
Gregory Bateson
#66. Official education was telling people almost nothing of the nature of all those things on the seashores, and in the redwood forests, in the deserts and in the plains.
Gregory Bateson
#67. 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.
Gregory Bateson
#68. What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you?
Gregory Bateson
#69. 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.
Gregory Bateson
#70. 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.
Gregory Bateson
#71. Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
Gregory Bateson
#72. Creative thought must always contain a random component.
Gregory Bateson
#73. 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?
Gregory Bateson
#74. Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
Gregory Bateson
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