Top 90 Quotes & Sayings by Gregory Bateson

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.

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

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.

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

All experience is subjective.

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

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

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

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

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.

Number is different from quantity.

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.

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.

Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.

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

Multiple descriptions are better than one.

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

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

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.

People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.

The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.

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

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?"

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.

Information is a difference that makes a difference.

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.

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?

Whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition ? 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.

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.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

It takes two to know one.

Without context words and actions have no meaning at all

Science probes; it does not prove.

After mastery comes artistry and not before.

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.

Creative thought must always contain a random component.

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

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

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

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.

Wisdom is the intelligence of the system as a whole.

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

The meaning of your communication is the response you get.

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.

Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.

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.

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.

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

Play is the establishment and exploration of relationship.

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