Gregory Bateson Quotes
The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.
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
Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction. Double description is better than one.
Gregory Bateson
The map is not the territory (coined by Alfred Korzybski), and the name is not the thing named.
Gregory Bateson
No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
Gregory Bateson
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.
Gregory Bateson
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.
Gregory Bateson
