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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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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
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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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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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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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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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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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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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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.
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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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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, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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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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People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
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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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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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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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Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
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Science probes it does not prove.
Gregory Bateson