Gregory Bateson

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

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.

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.

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

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

All experience is subjective.

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.