Mechanism Quotes - Page 20

• All the vital mechanisms, varied as they are, have only one object, that of preserving constant the conditions of life in the internal environment.

  Claude Bernard

  Environment, Constant, Internals

  Claude Bernard, Eugene Debs Robin (1979). “Claude Bernard and the internal environment: a memorial symposium”

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• A fully developed bureaucratic mechanism stands in the same relationship to other forms as does the machine to the non-mechanical production of goods. Precision, speed, clarity, documentary ability, continuity, discretion, unity, rigid subordination, reduction of friction and material and personal expenses are unique to bureaucratic organization.

  Max Weber

  Unique, Organization, Unity

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• In the Renaissance, madness was present everywhere and mingled with every experience by its images or its dangers. During the classical period, madness was shown, but on the other side of bars; if present, it was at a distance, under the eyes of a reason that no longer felt any relation to it and that would not compromise itself by too close a resemblance. Madness had become a thing to look at: no longer a monster inside oneself, but an animal with strange mechanisms, a bestiality from which man had long since been suppressed.

  Michel Foucault

  Distance, Eye, Animal

  Michel Foucault (2001). “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”, p.66, Psychology Press

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• 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.

  Benjamin Graham

  Long, Expansion, World

  "World Commodities and World Currencies". Book by Benjamin Graham. Chapter II, The Issue of Cartels, p. 21, 1944.

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• The Reservoir plan is an engineering mechanism applied to the field of economics, and in its essence it has nothing to do with democracy or any other political philosophy.

  Benjamin Graham

  Philosophy, Engineering, Essence

  "Storage and Stability". Book by Benjamin Graham, Part V, Chapter XIX, The Reservoir Plan and Tradition, p. 232, 1937.

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• LSD is a unique and powerful tool for the exploration of the human mind and human nature. Psychedelic experiences mediate access to deep realms of the psyche that have not yet been discovered and acknowledged by mainstream psychology and psychiatry. They also reveal new possibilities and mechanisms of therapeutic change and personality transformation.

  Stanislav Grof

  Powerful, Unique, Personality

  "LSD Psychotherapy". Book by Stanislav Grof, 1980.

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• When profits are pursued by geographic interchange of goods, so that commerce for profit becomes the central mechanism of the system, we usually call it "commercial capitalism." In such a system goods are conveyed from ares where they are more common (and therefore cheaper) to areas where they are less common (and therefore less cheap). This process leads to regional specialization and to division of labor, both in agricultural production and in handicrafts.

  Carroll Quigley

  Division Of Labor, Common, Process

  "The Evolution of Civilizations". Book by Carroll Quigley, Second Edition 1979, Chapter 8, Canaanite and Minooan Civilizations, p. 241, 1961.

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• Finding a mechanism does not bypass the problem of induction.

  Simon Blackburn

  Doe, Bypass, Problem

  Simon Blackburn (1999). “Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy”, p.155, Oxford University Press

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• One mechanism of repression is the grand jury.

  Michael Parenti

  Political, Jury, Repression

  Michael Parenti (1998). “America Besieged”, p.114, City Lights Books

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• The ability of nonintelligent people to understand the most complicated mechanisms and to use them has always been to me a cause of astonishment: their inability to understand simple questions is even more astonishing. The general acceptance of simple ideas is difficult and rare, and yet it is only when simple, fundamental, ideas have been accepted that further progress becomes possible on a higher level.

  George Sarton

  Acceptance, Simple, Ideas

  George Sarton (1952). “A History of Science: Ancient science through the Golden Age of Greece”

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• Failure is the mechanism of learning.

  Geoffrey Ballard

  Failure

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• It can be argued that the U.S. brokerage and investment banking industry has transformed the modern American stock market into nothing more than a mechanism for transferring wealth from shareholders to management.

  Peter Schiff

  Banking, Management, Wealth

  Peter D. Schiff (2011). “Crash Proof 2.0: How to Profit From the Economic Collapse”, p.133, John Wiley & Sons

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• 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.

  Nicholas G. Carr

  Mean, Hands, Economic Value

  "Web 2.0lier than thou" by Nicholas G. Carr, www.roughtype.com. October 23, 2006.

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• Some god or Weltgeist has been making a movie out of us for the past six thousand years, and now we have turned a corner on the movie set of reality and have discovered the boards propping up the two-dimensional monuments of human history. The movement of humanism has reached its limit, and now at that limit it is breaking apart into the opposites of mechanism and mysticism and moving along the circumference of a vast new sphere of posthuman thought.

  William Irwin Thompson

  Moving, Past, Reality

  William Irwin Thompson (1980). “Passages about Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture”, HarperCollins

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• The exclusion of true esoteric religion has been the business of the State since ancient times. At first this was done via the establishment of the popular idealism of exoteric religious institutions in league with the State. But in modern times the same process is done by the strategic exclusion of conventional religious cultism, mystical idealism, and higher evolutionary Wisdom from the mechanisms of popular culture.

  Adi Da

  Religious, League, Done

  Adi Da Samraj (1980). “Scientific proof of the existence of God will soon be announced by the White House!: prophetic wisdom about the myths and idols of mass culture and popular religious cultism, the new priesthood of scientific and political materialism, and the secrets of enlightenment hidden in the body of man”, Dawn Horse Pr

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• Over a wide field of our economy it is still the better course to rely on the nineteenth century's "hidden hand" than to thrust clumsy bureaucratic fingers into its sensitive mechanism. In particular, we cannot afford to damage its mainspring, freedom of competitive enterprise.

  John James Cowperthwaite

  Hands, Fields, Damage

  Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council (p. 133), March 30, 1962.

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• The absolute deterioration of the wiki concept is just a matter of time. Once spam mechanisms are developed to eat into these systems, the caretakers will be too busy to stop the public-driven deterioration.

  John C. Dvorak

  Deterioration, Matter, Busy

  "The Wikification of Knowledge". www.pcmag.com. July 11, 2005.

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• Faculty Psychology is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly, the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life. Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.

  Jerry Fodor

  Mean, Differences, Views

  "Modularity of Mind". Book by Jerry Fodor, 1983.

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• Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation - e.g., the problem of determining which sequence of words a given utterance encodes. Since, in the general case, transducer outputs underdetermine perceptual analyses, we can think of the solution of such problems as involving processes of nondemonstrative inference. In particular, we can think of each input system as a computational mechanism which projects and confirms a certain class of hyputheses on the basis of a certain body of data.

  Jerry Fodor

  Thinking, Data, Class

  "Wittgenstein, Mind, and Meaning". Book by Meredith Williams, 2002 edition.

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• The emergence of a unified cognitive moment relies on the coordination of scattered mosaics of functionally specialized brain regions. Here we review the mechanisms of large-scale integration that counterbalance the distributed anatomical and functional organization of brain activity to enable the emergence of coherent behaviour and cognition. Although the mechanisms involved in large-scale integration are still largely unknown, we argue that the most plausible candidate is the formation of dynamic links mediated by synchrony over multiple frequency bands.

  Francisco Varela

  Organization, Brain, Behaviour

  "The brainweb: phase synchronization and large-scale integration", Nature Rviews Vol 2, p. 229, 2001.

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• As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Time, in no other Western country is the teaching of Evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout the world, one way or another, most Christian denominations have managed to reconcile belief in God with belief in the mechanisms of natural selection. A French or German or Scandinavian politician who called for students to entertain as a reasonable deduction from existing evidence the proposition that Earth is at most 10,000 years old would be bundled off to a mental hospital.

  Katha Pollitt

  Christian, Country, Teaching

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• All organisms vary, and it's just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it's true. Darwin didn't know the mechanism of heredity, but you don't have to. You just need to know the fact of it.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  People, Needs, Looks

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• There is no subject more captivating, more worthy of study, than nature. To understand this great mechanism, to discover the forces which are active, and the laws which govern them, is the highest aim of the intellect of man.

  Nikola Tesla

  Men, Law, Study

  Thomas Commerford Martin, Nikola Tesla (1894). “The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla: With Special Reference to His Work in Polyphase Currents and High Potential Lighting”

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• I run a modest-sized laboratory thats looking specifically at what we call the pathogenic mechanisms of HIV disease, or AIDS.

  Anthony S. Fauci

  Running, Disease, Hiv

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• The masks we wear are simply veils that we have chosen to hide behind in order to get our way, or to demonstrate how we are reacting to the powers and forces that seem to influence us from the external world. They are part of our self image, and in some cases the mask is nothing more than a protective device, a defense mechanism.

  John Randolph Price

  Self, Order, World

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