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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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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
Learn
Ideas
Nothing
Lack
Except
Possible
Wrong
Idea

More quotes by Gregory Bateson

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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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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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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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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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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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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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There are no monotone values in biology.
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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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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
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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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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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The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
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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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Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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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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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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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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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
Gregory Bateson