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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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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
Years
Life
Anthropologist
Sphinx
Anthropologists
Riddle
Devoted
Professional
Fifty

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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 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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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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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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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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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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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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Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.
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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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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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Science probes it does not prove.
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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
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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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Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
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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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