Quotes from Gregory Bateson

There are no monotone "values" in biology.

Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.

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

Number is different from quantity.

Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Without context words and actions have no meaning at all

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

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.

Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.

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 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.

All experience is subjective.