"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."

First, Importance, Living

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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."

Exlpore more First quotes

"The first year I was on the show, it took an interviewer about 45 minutes to get it out of me that I even had a dog, and even then I wouldn't tell him the dog's name."

David Hyde Pierce, American Actor

First, Name

"If the destination is heaven, why do we scramble to be first in line for hell?"

Douglas Horton, American Clergyman

First, Heaven, Hell

"If you can take the hot lead enema, then you can cast the first stone."

Lenny Bruce, American Comedian

First,

"But somehow, I felt no inclination to be interested in it in any amateur way, let alone professional, until suddenly I became interested. And the first thing I did was to compose: not play an instrument, but to compose."

Gunther Schuller, American Composer

First, Play

"The second trial was a fair trial. I do not call it a second trial. I call it a fair trial, as opposed to the first trial, which was an unfair trial, a Roman holiday."

Sam Sheppard, American Scientist

First, Holiday

"I miss the personalization that Vegas was - there were showroom captains and all the dealers knew the gamblers by their first names."

Wayne Newton, American Musician

First, Names

"When I first began to write, I was writing on bass, because I was thinking more Public Image, more dub."

Gavin Rossdale, British Musician

First, Public, Thinking, Writing

"My first album is playful."

Mary J. Blige, American Musician

First,

"Illusion is the first of all pleasures."

Oscar Wilde, Irish Dramatist

First, Illusion

"The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them."

Paul Hawken, American Environmentalist

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Explore more quotes by Gregory Bateson

"There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong."

Energy

"It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity."

Quantity

"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."

People

"Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction."

Language

"Number is different from quantity."

Quantity

"Rather, for all objects and experiences, there is a quantity that has optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived."

Quantity

"We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future."

Future

"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."

Time

"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."

Education

"Logic is a poor model of cause and effect."

Cause