Mechanism Quotes

As the power of Christianity declined through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased.

A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart.

My way of dealing with the world has always been to make fun of it and observe it but not take part in it.That's how I became a writer. But when you have kids, suddenly you have to be part of things. It leads almost to a breakdown because your whole defense mechanism is now really destructive.

Without comedy as a defense mechanism I wouldn't be able to survive.

Moral justification is a powerful disengagement mechanism. Destructive conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it in the service of moral ends. This is why most appeals against violent means usually fall on deaf ears.

I've been trying to learn how to not be so conflicted about things like my own anger. I've always had a place in my music for my anger as a way of compensating for not having a mechanism to express it in my everyday life. So I've been trying to be more true to myself, and that helps me to chill out a little bit. But politically, uh-uh. No.

The government has become a mechanism for distributing largess, and your census form is your ticket.

Money is a mechanism for control.

Many Nobel Prizes are awaiting good research to understand and explain the many mysteries of our bodies, such as the basic mechanism of memory or imagination.

If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success.

How accurately can the law fix the crime? There has to be a mechanism for very fast action. The law is like this: catch them and punish them.

The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

I gained direct knowledge of the life of the poor in big towns: I have lived the narrowing mechanism of its conditioning and feared it.

As a kid I was short and only weighed 95 pounds. And though I was active in a lot of Sports and got along with most of the guys, I think I used comedy as a defense mechanism. You know making someone laugh is a much better way to solve a problem than by using your fists.

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

The purpose of the UN mechanism, this inspection mechanism, is not to engage in a cat and mouse game with Saddam Hussein and try to find weapons that the Iraqi government is working on concealing.

We are like the mechanism of a watch: each part is essential.

Sundance was started as a mechanism for the discovery of new voices and new talent.

The Jews are trying to destroy all other cultures - as a survival mechanism - the only Nazi country in the world is Israel.

Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It's basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it's wonderful that the new tools have empowered that protestor so that state secrets, bad developments are not hidden anymore.

Vegetables, which are the lowest in the scale of living things, are fed by roots, which, implanted in the native soil, select by the action of a peculiar mechanism, different subjects, which serve to increase and to nourish them.

I used food as a coping mechanism for many, many years, and it was my best friend for a long time.

There are no two countries with the same style of economic mechanism, with the same capitalism.

The SSRC committee turned attention from team research for building a model of the United States to doing one for world trade in order to investigate the international transmission mechanism.

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

I was actually pretty shy in school. My defense mechanism was to be the class clown. I remember getting into a lot of trouble for being disruptive, and I was brought in front of the headteacher, who said: 'What's going to happen to you; what are you going to do when you grow up?' and I said: 'Well, I'm obviously going to be a comedian.'

Trade helps bring us products cheaply, but there is no guarantee whatsoever to assume that it will allow us to replace the jobs that have been lost, and there is no mechanism under productivity that says that, either.

I always want to write erotic music... Not only about the love between men and women, but in a much more universal sense - about the sensuality of the mechanism of the universe... about life.

I see nothing wrong with the human trait to desire. In fact, I consider it integral to our success mechanism. Becoming attached to what we desire is what causes the trouble. If you must have it in order to be happy, then you are denying the happiness of the here and now.