Gregory Bateson Quotes (30 Quotes)


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

    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.

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

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

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


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

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

    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.

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

    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.


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

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    Of all these examples, the simplest but the most profound is the fact that it takes at least two somethings to create a difference.

    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.

    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.

    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

    Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.

    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.

    From the point of view of any agent who imposes a quantitative change, any change of pattern which may occur will be unpredictable or divergent.

    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 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.


    The processes of perception are inaccessible only the products are conscious and, of course, it is the products that are necessary.


    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.

    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?


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