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

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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
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Science probes it does not prove.
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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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People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
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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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Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
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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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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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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
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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 to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
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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, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.
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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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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 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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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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