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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.

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
Science
Art
Presuppositions
Even
Warfare
Like
Commerce
Solutions
Based
Sleep
Religion

More quotes by Gregory Bateson

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Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
Gregory Bateson
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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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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The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
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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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People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
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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 nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
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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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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
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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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There are no monotone values in biology.
Gregory Bateson
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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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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.
Gregory Bateson
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Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
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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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'
Gregory Bateson
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
Gregory Bateson
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Science probes it does not prove.
Gregory Bateson