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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.

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
Destroys
Wins
Creature
Creatures
Environment
Winning

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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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There are no monotone values in biology.
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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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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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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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The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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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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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
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The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
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