“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.”

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

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“Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.”

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“For all objects and experiences, there is a quantity that has optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived.”

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“We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong”

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“Is the human species changing its own environment with slowly increasing pollution and rotting its mind with slowly deteriorating religion and education in such a saucepan? [frog in slowly heating water]”

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“The stages of developing awareness begin with blaming and then expand to a discovery that the transgressions were only a response to what others have done”

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“For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception - his epistemological premises - he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be.”

from Steps to an Ecology of the Mind

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“If it were possible adequately to present the whole of a culture, stressing every aspect exactly as appears in the culture itself, no single detail would appear bizarre or strange or arbitrary to the reader, but rather the details would all appear natural and reasonable as they do to the natives who have lived all their lives within the culture.”

from Naven​ (1936)

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“The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named.”

from Mind and nature: a necessary unity (1988)​

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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.”

from Steps to an Ecology of the Mind

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“If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will ramify throughout his whole universe.”

from Steps to an Ecology of the Mind

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“Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.”

from Mind and nature: a necessary unity (1988)​

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“For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception—his epistemological premises—he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be.”

from Steps to an Ecology of the Mind

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“We create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in.”

from Steps to an Ecology of the Mind

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“in the dim region where art, magic, and religion meet and overlap, human beings have evolved the 'metaphor that is meant,' the flag which men will die to save, and the sacrament that is felt to be more than an outward and visible sign, given unto us.'”

from A Theory of Play and Fantasy

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“the distribution of flexibility among the many variables of a system is a matter of very great importance. The healthy system... may be compared to an acrobat on a high wire... he must be free to move from one position of instability to another... If his arms are fixed or paralyzed (isolated from communication), he must fall.”

from Steps to an Ecology of the Mind

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“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.”

from Steps to an Ecology of the Mind

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“A little hypocrisy and a little compromise oils the wheels of social life”

from Steps to an Ecology of the Mind

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“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.”

from Steps to an Ecology of the Mind

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“For all objects and experiences there is a quantity that has an optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived.”

from Mind and nature: a necessary unity (1988)​

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“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.”

from Mind and nature: a necessary unity (1988)​

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“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. The Marxian error is a simple blunder in logical typing, a confusion of individual with class.”

from Mind and nature: a necessary unity (1988)​

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“A relationship with no combat in it is dull, and a relationship with too much combat in it is toxic. What is desirable is a relationship with a certain optimum of conflict.”

from Mind and nature: a necessary unity (1988)​

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