Quote

Information is a difference that makes a difference.

Gregory Bateson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Gregory Bateson
Age: 76 †
Born: 1904
Born: May 9
Died: 1980
Died: July 4
Anthropologist
Biologist
Film Director
Linguist
Philosopher
Psychologist
Semiotician
Sociologist
Grantchester
Cambridgeshire
Difference
Differences
Information
Makes

More quotes by Gregory Bateson

Image
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
Image
We are discovering today that several of the premises which are deeply ingrained in our way of life are simply untrue and become pathogenic when implemented with modern technology.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
Gregory Bateson
Image
No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Multiple descriptions are better than one.
Gregory Bateson
Image
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.
Gregory Bateson
Image
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.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
Gregory Bateson
Image
We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future. We shall never be able to say, Ha! My perception, my accounting for that series, will indeed cover its next and future components, or Next time I meet with these phenomena, I shall be able to predict their total course.
Gregory Bateson
Image
It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
Gregory Bateson
Image
The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
Gregory Bateson
Image
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
Image
The wise legislator will only rarely initiate a new rule of behaviour more usually he will confine himself to affirming in law what has already become the custom of the people.
Gregory Bateson
Image
The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
Gregory Bateson
Image
The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
Gregory Bateson
Image
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.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Science probes it does not prove.
Gregory Bateson
Image
There are many matters and many circumstances in which consciousness is undesirable and silence is golden, so that secrecy can be used as a marker to tell us that we are approaching the holy.
Gregory Bateson