108 Quotes by Gregory Bateson

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 .

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.

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.