Mechanism Quotes - Page 25

• Should a man live underground, and there converse with the works of art and mechanism, and should afterwards be brought up into the open day, and see the several glories of the heaven and earth, he would immediately pronounce them the work of such a Being as we define God to be.

  Aristotle

  God, Art, Men

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• The photographs of space taken by our astronauts have been published all over the place. But the eye is a much more dynamic mechanism than any camera or pictures. It's a more exciting view in person than looking at the photographs. Of course, I personally am sick and tired of hearing people talk like that: I want to see it myself!

  Burt Rutan

  Taken, Tired, Eye

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• I realized that there was a thrilling undiscovered country to be explored in the mechanisms of the mammalian nervous system. Through it, one might approach the mystery of the mind.

  Wilder Penfield

  Country, Mind, Might

  Wilder Penfield (2015). “Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain”, p.9, Princeton University Press

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• If I were to adopt pure mechanism as a philosophy, there would be no way I could choose to be a scholar.

  Kenneth Lee Pike

  Philosophy, Would Be, Way

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• [For men] to feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism numbered with its wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes - this, nature bade not, - this, God blesses not, - this, humanity for no long time is able to endure.

  John Ruskin

  Men, Long, Political

  John Ruskin (2012). “Selections From the Works of John Ruskin”, p.215, tredition

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• Compassion, however, should mean providing a mechanism to escape poverty rather than simply maintaining people in an impoverished state by supplying handouts. By doing this we give them an opportunity to elevate their personal situations, which eventually decreases our need to take care of them and empowers them to be able to exercise compassion toward others.

  Benjamin Carson

  Mean, Exercise, Opportunity

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• 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.

  Thomas Carlyle

  War, Men, Technology

  Thomas Carlyle, G. B. Tennyson (1984). “Carlyle Reader”, p.356, CUP Archive

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• For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Men, Machinery, Producers

  Thomas Carlyle (2014). “The Selected Works of Thomas Carlyle”, p.22, Lulu.com

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• The mechanisms of vis medicatrix naturæ—the most healing power of nature—are so effective that most diseases are self-terminating.

  Rene Dubos

  Healing, Health, Self

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• There is a desperate tendency to try to legislate artists, to try to lay down rules for their obligations to society. Just leave artists alone. If you are a true artist, you will have a very finely tuned moral mechanism.

  Athol Fugard

  Artist, Trying, Moral

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• In a city a man may feel second to none. But alone in the immensity of the universe, among all the creatures that preceded man and built up the human species, even a most fervent atheist will wonder if Darwin found the visible road but not the invisible mechanism.

  Thor Heyerdahl

  God, Atheist, Men

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• Over-population is a phenomenon connected with the survival of the unfit, and it is a mechanism which has created conditions favourable to the survival of the unfit and the elimination of the fit.

  William Ralph Inge

  Survival, Population, Fit

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• One of the problems of taking things apart and seeing how they work - supposing you're trying to find out how a cat works--you take that cat apart to see how it works, what you've got in your hands is a non-working cat. The cat wasn't a sort of clunky mechanism that was susceptible to our available tools of analysis.

  Douglas Adams

  Cat, Hands, Supposing That

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• A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man's emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel--until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.

  Ayn Rand

  Men, Emotional, Erosion

  Ayn Rand (1990). “The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought”, p.103, Penguin

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• The White House, in advancing the agenda for a [school] "choice" plan, rests its faith on market mechanisms. What reason have the black and very poor to lend their credence to a market system that has proved so obdurate and so resistant to their pleas at every turn?

  Jonathan Kozol

  Education, School, White

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• The most powerful force possessed by the individual citizen is her own government. ... Government is the only organized mechanism that makes possible that level of shared disinterest known as the public good.

  John Ralston Saul

  Powerful, Government, Individuality

  John Ralston Saul (2012). “The Unconscious Civilization”, p.74, Simon and Schuster

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• The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.

  Lou Gerstner

  Real, Owners, Involvement

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• If he (The New York Taxi Driver) talked to me, he might lose his concentration, which would be very bad because the taxi has some kind of problem with the steering, probably dead pedestrians lodged in the mechanism, the result being that there is a delay of 8 to 10 seconds between the time the driver turns the wheel and the time the taxi actually changes direction, a handicap that the driver is compensating for by going 175 miles per hour, at which velocity we are able to remain airborne almost to the far rim of some of the smaller potholes.

  Dave Barry

  New York, Humorous, Would Be

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• We are beginning to see practical support. And this is a very significant sign of the movement towards a new era, a new age.... We see both in our country and elsewhere... ghosts of the old thinking.... When we rid ourselves of their presence, we will be better able to move toward a new world order...relying on the relevent mechanisms of the United Nations.

  Mikhail Gorbachev

  Country, Money, Moving

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• All the inventions and devices ever constructed by the human hand or conceived by the human mind, no matter how delicate, how intricate and complicated, are simple, childish toys compared with that most marvelously wrought mechanism, the human body. Its parts are far more delicate, and their mutual adjustments infinitely more accurate, than are those of the most perfect chronometer ever made.

  John Harvey Kellogg

  Science, Simple, Hands

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• Any society has to delegate the responsibility to maintain a certain kind of order. Enforcing regulations, making sure people stop at stoplights. We can’t function as a society without rules and regulations, and the enforcement mechanism of those rules and regulations.

  Joseph Stiglitz

  Responsibility, Order, People

  "Across the Great Divide: A Conversation with Joseph Stiglitz". Interview with Charles Reinhardt, www.barnesandnoble.com. May 19, 2015.

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• The stock market is a wonderfully efficient mechanism for transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient.

  Warren Buffett

  Patient, Wealth, Efficient

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• There is a wheel on the affairs of men revolve and its mechanism is such that it prevents any man from being always fortunate.

  Croesus

  Men, Wheels, Affair

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• In every failure is the seed of success...
  Our failures are stepping stones in the mechanics of creation, bringing us even closer to our goals. In reality, there is no such thing as failure. What we call failure is just a mechanism through which we can learn to do things right.

  Deepak Chopra

  Reality, Goal, Stones

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• The most tragic consequence of our criticism of a man is to block his way to humiliation and grace, precisely to drive him into the mechanisms of self justification and into his faults instead of freeing him from them. For him, our voice drowns the voice of God.

  Paul Tournier

  Block, Men, Self

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