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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.

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
Already
Initiate
Wise
Legislators
Law
Custom
Become
Behaviour
People
Customs
Rarely
Legislator
Rule
Confine
Usually
Affirming

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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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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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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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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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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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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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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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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 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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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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Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
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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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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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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
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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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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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