All Gregory Bateson Quotes
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
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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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
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It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.
Gregory Bateson
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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?
Gregory Bateson
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Logic can often be reversed, but the effect does not precede the cause.
Gregory Bateson
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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
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Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.
Gregory Bateson
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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
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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
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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
Gregory Bateson
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We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future.
Gregory Bateson
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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
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