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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
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More quotes by Gregory Bateson

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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
Gregory Bateson
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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?
Gregory Bateson
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The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
Gregory Bateson
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
Gregory Bateson
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
Gregory Bateson
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Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.
Gregory Bateson
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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
Gregory Bateson
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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
Gregory Bateson
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A major difficulty is that the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is partly a product of the answers that we already have given to the riddle in its various forms.
Gregory Bateson
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There are no monotone values in biology.
Gregory Bateson
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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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Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
Gregory Bateson
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
Gregory Bateson
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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
Gregory Bateson
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In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
Gregory Bateson
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We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.
Gregory Bateson