Gregory Bateson Quotes

Information is a difference that makes a difference.

Just as houses are made of stone, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house, and a collection of facts is not necessarily science

The core advantage of data is that it tells you something about the world that you didn't know before.

What we mean by information - the elementary unit of information - is a difference which makes a difference, and it is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continually transformed are themselves provided with energy. The pathways are ready to be triggered. We may even say that the question is already implicit in them.

Negative information is that which, immediately upon acquiring, causes the recipient to know less than he did before.

Make a difference no matter what role you play

We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge.

Knowledge is the key to making a difference.

We have many years to eat and sleep, but how many years do we have to make a difference in the lives of others? That's the highest calling any of us can have: Living our life so as to intentionally add value to others. But to do this, we have to make ourselves more valuable. We have to keep learning, growing, developing as leaders and taking responsibility for being the change we want to see in the world.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

Connect, create meaning, make a difference, matter, be missed.

Politics matters. Ideas matter. Democracy matters, because all of us need to be able to make a difference.

I want to make a difference.

One person really can make a difference. Each person is the revolution.

Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.

What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

Young people, when informed and empowered, when they realize that what they do truly makes a difference, can indeed change the world.

You can only make a difference by being different.

My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'

Your mind and a computer have one thing in common: neither of them know the difference between the truth... and what you tell it.

I think I just want to leave my mark in some way. I hope I leave the world a better place than it was when I came, and I think the best way I can do that is through acting and writing, and hopefully it will make a difference someday.

However, I continue to try and I continue, indefatigably, to reach out. There's no way I can single-handedly save the world or, perhaps, even make a perceptible difference - but how ashamed I would be to let a day pass without making one more effort.

What can you do to make a difference? And why should you do it? (...) the scale of one's social investments doesn't matter. What matters is that you operate as a force for good at every scale available to you.

It makes a difference doesn't it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?

The cumulative effect of each person making a change in his or her own life will make a difference.