Gregory Bateson famous quotes

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

#Thinking #Differences #People

We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
-- Gregory Bateson

#Epistemology

But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Powerful #Believe #Self

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 D.N.A.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Skills #People #Parent

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

#Men #Mind #Suffering

Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Balls #Characteristics

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

#Thinking #Two #Quality

Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Stress #Sides #Language

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

#Orchids #Lobster #Patterns

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

#Sea #People #Redwoods

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

#War #Moving #Next

Information is a difference that makes a difference.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Differences #Making A Difference #Information

All experience is subjective.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Subjectivity

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.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Mean #Two #Numbers

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.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Believe #Opportunity #Ideas

Schizophrenia --its nature, etiology, and the kind of therapy to use for it--remains one of the most puzzling of the mental illnesses. The theory of schizophrenia presented here is based on communications analysis, and specifically on the Theory of Logical Types. From this theory and from observations of schizophrenic patients is derived a description, and the necessary conditions for, a situation called the "double bind"--a situation in which no matter what a person does, he "can't win." It is hypothesized that a person caught in the double bind may develop schizophrenic symptoms
-- Gregory Bateson

#Communication #Winning #Doe

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

#Beauty #Beautiful #Believe

Money is always transitively valued. More money is supposedly always better than less money.
-- Gregory Bateson

#More Money

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

#Fall #Toxic #Variables

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

#Mean #Numbers #Next

No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels. Broadly, we can afford to sink those sorts of knowledge which continue to be true regardless of changes in the environment, but we must maintain in an accessible place all those controls of behavior which must be modified for every instance. The economics of the system, in fact, pushes organisms toward sinking into the unconscious those generalities of relationship which remain permanently true and toward keeping within the conscious the pragmatic of particular instances.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Levels #Matter #Facts

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

#Art #Sleep #Warfare

Things have to be done fast in America , and therefore therapy has to be brief.
-- Gregory Bateson

#America #Done #Therapy

Women watched for the spectacular performances of the men , and there can be no reasonable doubt that the presence of an audience is a very important factor in shaping the men's behavior. In fact, it is probable that the men are more exhibitionistic because the women admire their performances. Conversely, there can be no doubt that the spectacular behavior is a stimulus which summons the audience together, promoting in the women the appropriate behavior.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Men #Doubt #Important

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

#Animal #Grace #Sensitive

Number is different from quantity.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Numbers #Different #Quantity

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

#Beautiful #Attitude #Details

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

#Principles #Patterns #Impossible

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

#Believe

Desired substance, things, patterns, or sequences of experience that are in some sense "good" for the organism - items of diet, conditions of life, temperature, entertainment, sex, and so forth - are never such that more of the something is always better than less of the something. 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

#Sex #Fall #Simplicity

Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Causes #Logic #Poor

It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Years #Sphinx #Fifty

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

#Doe #Causes #Logic

Our initial sensory data are always "first derivatives," statements about differences which exist among external objects or statements about changes which occur either in them or in our relationship to them. Objects and circumstances which remain absolutely constant relative to the observer, unchanged either by his own movement or by external events, are in general difficult and perhaps always impossible to perceive. What we perceive easily is difference and change and difference is a relationship.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Data #Differences #Events

There are no monotone "values" in biology.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Biology #Values

Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Mind #Process

What we mean by information the elementary unit of information is a difference which makes a difference, and it is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continually transformed are themselves provided with energy. The pathways are ready to be triggered. We may even say that the question is already implicit in them.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Mean #Differences #Making A Difference

Multiple descriptions are better than one.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Description #Multiple

Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. It differs, however, from most other branches of human activity in that not only are the pathways of scientific thought determined by the presuppositions of the scientists but their goals are the testing and revision of old presuppositions and the creation of new.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Art #Sleep #Goal

We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future. We shall never be able to say, "Ha! My perception, my accounting for that series, will indeed cover its next and future components," or "Next time I meet with these phenomena, I shall be able to predict their total course.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Perception #Able #Next

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

#Names #Maps #Territory

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

#World #Clear

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

#Finals #Tests #Way

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

#Wise #Men #Tools

It takes two to know one.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Two

After mastery comes artistry and not before.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Mastery #Artistry

Somebody was saying to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things the way they are-objective pictures. He mumbled that he wasn't quite sure what that would be. The person who was bullying him produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said, "There, you see, that is a picture of how she really is." Picasso looked at it and said, "She is rather small, isn't she? And flat?"
-- Gregory Bateson

#Bullying #Wife #Perspective

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

#Spiritual #Emotional #Hands

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

#Sphinx #Answers #Given

The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Winning #Environment #Creatures

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

#Religious #Training #Source

The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Want #Pathology

Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Together #Fabric #Alive

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

#Music #Silence #Listening

Pathology is a relatively easy thing to discuss, health is very difficult. This, of course, is one of the reasons why there is such a thing as the sacred, and why the sacred is difficult to talk about, because the sacred is peculiarly related to the healthy. One does not like to disturb the sacred, for in general, to talk about something changes it, and perhaps will turn it into a pathology.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Healthy #Religion #Sacred

Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics.
-- Gregory Bateson

#World #Fantasy #Mathematics

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

#Neurons #Used #Combination

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

#Heart #Knowing #Answers

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

#Enough

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

#Men #Doe #Nucleus

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

#Two #Interesting #Patterns

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

#Class #Steps #Sphinx

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

#Strong #Believe #Patterns

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

#Levels #Matter #Conscious

If it were possible adequately to present the whole of a culture , stressing every aspect exactly as appears in the culture itself, no single detail would appear bizarre or strange or arbitrary to the reader, but rather the details would all appear natural and reasonable as they do to the natives who have lived all their lives within the culture.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Stress #Details #Culture

The meaning of your communication is the response you get.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Communication #Response

Whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition Â… we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of lose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science.
-- Gregory Bateson

#Running #Pride #Thinking

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

#Men #Information #Causes