Gregory Bateson Quotes

• Information is any difference that makes a difference.

  Gregory Bateson

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• 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

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

  Gregory Bateson

• 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

• 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

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

  Gregory Bateson

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Number is different from quantity.

  Gregory Bateson

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

  Gregory Bateson

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

  Gregory Bateson

• Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.

  Gregory Bateson

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

  Gregory Bateson

• Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.

  Gregory Bateson

• 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

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

  Gregory Bateson

• 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

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

  Gregory Bateson

• 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

Gregory Bateson (26)

Birth:	9th May, 1904
Death:	4th July, 1980
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Anthropologist, Linguist

About

Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. In the 1940s he helped extend systems theory/cybernetics to the social/behavioral sciences, and spent the last decade of his life developing a "meta-science" of epistemology to bring together the various early forms of systems theory developing in various fields of science. Some of his most noted writings are to be found in his books, Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature. Angels Fear was co-authored by his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson.

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Births

• 1949 - Robin Gibb
• 1915 - Barbara Billingsley
• 1948 - Martin Yan
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• 1889 - B. Carroll Reece

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• 1998 - Virginia Graham
• 1943 - Beatrix Potter
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• 1940 - Nathanael West
• 1899 - Dwight L. Moody