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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.

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
First
Answer
Workings
Steps
Riddle
Answers
Civilisation
Turn
Conduct
Class
Systems
Turns
Actual
Living
Importance
Firsts
Step
Sphinx

More quotes by Gregory Bateson

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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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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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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
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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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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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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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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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The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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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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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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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'
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There are no monotone values in biology.
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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
Gregory Bateson
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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
Gregory Bateson
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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
Gregory Bateson
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
Gregory Bateson