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What is true is that the idea of power corrupts. Power corrupts most rapidly those who believe in it, and it is they who will want it most. Obviously, our democratic system tends to give power to those who hunger for it and gives every opportunity to those who don’t want power to avoid getting it. Not a very satisfactory arrangement if power corrupts those who believe in it and want it.

— Gregory Bateson Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)

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More quotes by Gregory Bateson

Things have to be done fast in America, and therefore therapy has to be brief.

p. 148 as cited in: C.H. Patterson (1958)

Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.

The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named (see also, Alfred Korzybski).

The world partly becomes — comes to be — how it is imagined.

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?

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Gregory Bateson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.