Mechanism Quotes

It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanism of friendship. (Colette)
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. View quote
Max Born
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future. View quote
Frank Herbert
In fact, without any exaggeration, the current mechanism of money creation through credit is certainly the "cancer" that's irretrievably eroding market economies of private property. View quote
Maurice Allais
Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability. View quote
Ronald Fisher
Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. View quote
Chuck Palahniuk
I recognize nothing that is not material. In physics, chemistry and biology I see only mechanics. The Universe is nothing but an infinite and complex mechanism. Its complexity is so great that it borders on willfulness, suddenness, and randomness; it gives the illusion of free will possessed by conscious beings. View quote
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it? View quote
Edward Bernays
There were real reasons that you were attracted to somebody originally. The brain doesn't pick willy-nilly. Unless you part ways hating each other for some reason, that mechanism could get triggered again. You can literally fall in love again. View quote
Helen Fisher
Dishonesty is all about the small acts we can take and then think, 'No, this not real cheating.' So if you think that the main mechanism is rationalization, then what you come up with, and that's what we find, is that we're basically trying to balance feeling good about ourselves. (Dan Ariely)
Without comedy as a defense mechanism I wouldn't be able to survive. View quote
Garry Shandling
We know that communication must be hampered, and its form largely determined, by the unconscious but inevitable influence of a transmitting mechanism, whether that be of a merely mechanical or of a physiological character. View quote
Oliver Lodge
Money is a mechanism for control. View quote
David Korten
The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place. View quote
David R. Brower
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. View quote
Douglas J. Feith
The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, Web 2.0 provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very, very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very, very few. View quote
Nicholas G. Carr
Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity: men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner. View quote
Thomas Carlyle
Mathematics is of two kinds, Rigorous and Physical. The former is Narrow: the latter Bold and Broad. To have to stop to formulate rigorous demonstrations would put a stop to most physico-mathematical inquiries. Am I to refuse to eat because I do not fully understand the mechanism of digestion? View quote
Oliver Heaviside
Repetition acts as an enforcement mechanism: It makes cooperation achievable when it is not achievable in the one-shot game, even when one replaces strategic equilibrium as the criterion for achievability by the more stringent requirement of perfect equilibrium. (Robert Aumann)
Humour has always been a self-defence mechanism for me. View quote
Brooke Shields
Auto-suggestion is disconcerting in its simplicity. To the uninitiated, auto-suggestion or self-mastery is likely to appear disconcerting in its simplicity. But does not every discovery, every invention, seem simple and ordinary once it has become vulgarized and the details or mechanism of it known to the man in the street? Not that I am claiming autosuggestion as my discovery. Far from it, auto-suggestion is as old as the hills; only we had forgotten to practice it, and so we needed to learn it all over again. View quote
Émile Coué
Finding a mechanism does not bypass the problem of induction. View quote
Simon Blackburn
Cartels have spread and will spread as long as the world lacks an effective mechanism by which balanced expansion may be achieved without a resulting disruption of prices. View quote
Benjamin Graham