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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
Environment
Winning
Destroys
Wins
Creature
Creatures

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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
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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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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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People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
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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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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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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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There are no monotone values in biology.
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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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But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?
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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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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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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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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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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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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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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
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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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