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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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In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
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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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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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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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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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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 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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It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
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Science probes it does not prove.
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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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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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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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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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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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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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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 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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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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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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