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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

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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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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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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
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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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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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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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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see 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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Science probes it does not prove.
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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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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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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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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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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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Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.
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