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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
Others
Sharp
Thought
Useless
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Kinds
Men
Tools
Dangerous
Wise
Almost
Use
Blunt

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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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But 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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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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It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems.
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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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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.
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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
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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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People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
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The only way out is spiritual, intellectual, and emotional revolution in which, finally, we learn to experience first hand the interloping connections between person and person, organism and organism, action and consequence.
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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Interesting phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another.
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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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I shall argue that the problem of grace is fundamentally a problem of integration and what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind - especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called 'consciousness' and the other the 'unconscious'
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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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In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
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