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Some tools of thought are so blunt that they are almost useless others are so sharp that they are dangerous. But the wise man will have the use of both kinds.

Gregory Bateson

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Gregory Bateson
Age: 76 †
Born: 1904
Born: May 9
Died: 1980
Died: July 4
Anthropologist
Biologist
Film Director
Linguist
Philosopher
Psychologist
Semiotician
Sociologist
Grantchester
Cambridgeshire
Dangerous
Wise
Almost
Use
Blunt
Others
Sharp
Thought
Useless
Kind
Kinds
Men
Tools

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There are no monotone values in biology.
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In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
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There are many matters and many circumstances in which consciousness is undesirable and silence is golden, so that secrecy can be used as a marker to tell us that we are approaching the holy.
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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future. We shall never be able to say, Ha! My perception, my accounting for that series, will indeed cover its next and future components, or Next time I meet with these phenomena, I shall be able to predict their total course.
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The wise legislator will only rarely initiate a new rule of behaviour more usually he will confine himself to affirming in law what has already become the custom of the people.
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It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
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Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
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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.
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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time.
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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
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People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
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Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
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We are discovering today that several of the premises which are deeply ingrained in our way of life are simply untrue and become pathogenic when implemented with modern technology.
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The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
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Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
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