The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that adaptation to one's environment is essential for survival, and failing to do so can lead to self-destruction.
Gregory Bateson highlights the intricate relationship between living beings and their environments, positing that those who attempt to dominate or eliminate their environmental challenges ultimately harm themselves. This reflects a deeper philosophical understanding of coexistence and balance in nature, where harmony with one's surroundings is crucial for sustainability and survival.
In practice
In a speech about environmental issues, this quote could be used to emphasize the importance of sustainable practices.
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 impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.
Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.
What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you?
Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me
First, he realized that the sea was blue and that there was an enormous quantity of it, and that it roared and roared-really all the banalities about the ocean that one could realize, but if any one had told him then that these things were banalities, he would have gaped in wonder.
Commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways.
The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature -were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature.
You can't keep a juvenile moral institution alive on two displays of its sash per year.
Americans have the right and advantage of being armed - unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.