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The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.

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
Control
Courses
Course
Ever
Never
Pathology

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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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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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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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People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
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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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Science probes it does not prove.
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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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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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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.
Gregory Bateson
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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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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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It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
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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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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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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
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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
Gregory Bateson