Mechanism Quotes - Page 5

• 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.

  Albert Bandura

  Powerful, Fall, Mean

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• 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.

  Max Born

  Order, Perfect, Needs

  Max Born (2013). “Physics in My Generation”, p.63, Springer

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• 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.

  David R. Brower

  Agriculture, Machines, Fuel

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• Aging is basically the build-up of error: error at the genetic level, error at the cellular level. Cells normally repair themselves; that's why you heal when you get a cut. But even the mechanism of repair eventually falls apart.

  Michio Kaku

  Fall, Cutting, Errors

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• Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual obsession, not even obsession for this, or for that in particular; to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless.

  Jacques Lacan

  Mean, Doe, Obsession

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• Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

  Doris Lessing

  Our Society, Collapse, Dependent

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• The evolution of social media into a robust mechanism for social transformation is already visible. Despite many adamant critics who insist that tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are little more than faddish distractions useful only to exchange trivial information, these critics are being proven wrong time and again.

  Simon Mainwaring

  Media, Tools, Social Transformation

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• I don't have a shred of regret about entering the exchange-rate mechanism.

  John Major

  Regret, Entering, Rate

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• For all its shortcomings, Wikipedia does have strong governance and deliberative mechanisms; anyone who has ever followed discussions on Wikipedia's mailing lists will confirm that its moderators and administrators openly discuss controversial issues on a regular basis.

  Evgeny Morozov

  Strong, Issues, Wikipedia

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• Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. Flash.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Baby, Coping Mechanisms, Giving

  Chuck Palahniuk (2011). “Invisible Monsters: A Novel”, p.13, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

  Pat Conroy

  Running, Mind, Victory

  Pat Conroy (2010). “The Lords of Discipline: A Novel”, p.44, Open Road Media

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• So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Love, Men, Order

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• I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections. and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self, and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Mistake, Emotional, Self

  D. H. Lawrence (2008). “Complete Poems by Lawrence: Easyread Super Large 24pt Edition”, p.160, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• There are some mechanisms that are so—so broken that they cannot be repaired.

  Cassandra Clare

  Broken

  Cassandra Clare (2013). “The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Angel; Clockwork Prince; Clockwork Princess”, p.763, Simon and Schuster

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• Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Air, Apples, Outcomes

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History”, p.254, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Increasingly, search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world, and our place within it.

  John Battelle

  Our World, Marketing, World

  John Battelle (2011). “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture”, p.210, Nicholas Brealey Publishing

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• For the first time there was constructed with this machine [locomotive engine] a self-acting mechanism in which the interplay of forces took shape transparently enough to discern the connection between the heat generated and the motion produced. The great puzzle of the vital force was also immediately solved for the physiologist in that it became evident that it is more than a mere poetic comparison when one conceives of the coal as the food of the locomotive and the combustion as the basis for its life.

  Carl Ludwig

  Life, Science, Self

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• Cell genetics led us to investigate cell mechanics. Cell mechanics now compels us to infer the structures underlying it. In seeking the mechanism of heredity and variation we are thus discovering the molecular basis of growth and reproduction. The theory of the cell revealed the unity of living processes; the study of the cell is beginning to reveal their physical foundations.

  C. D. Darlington

  Cells, Growth, Unity

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• To obtain the pure silence necessary for the disciple, the heart and emotions, the brain and its intellectualisms, have to be put aside. Both are but mechanisms, which will perish with the span of man's life. It is the essence beyond, that which is the motive power, and makes man live, that is now compelled to rouse itself and act.

  Mabel Collins

  Heart, Men, Essence

  Mabel Collins (2007). “Light on the Path”, p.42, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that "we choose death."

  Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth

  Life, Science, Dna

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• The question whether atoms exist or not... belongs rather to metaphysics. In chemistry we have only to decide whether the assumption of atoms is an hypothesis adapted to the explanation of chemical phenomena... whether a further development of the atomic hypothesis promises to advance our knowledge of the mechanism of chemical phenomena... I rather expect that we shall some day find, for what we now call atoms, a mathematico-mechanical explanation, which will render an account of atomic weight, of atomicity, and of numerous other properties of the so-called atoms.

  August Kekule

  Knowledge, Science, Promise

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• For truly in nature there are many operations that are far more than mechanical. Nature is not simply an organic body like a clock, which has no vital principle of motion in it; but it is a living body which has life and perception, which are much more exalted than a mere mechanism or a mechanical motion.

  Anne Conway, Viscountess Conway

  Life, Nature, Science

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• The genetic theory of homosexuality has been generally discarded today. . . . Despite the interest in possible hormone mechanisms in the origin of homosexuality, no serious scientist today suggests that a simple cause-effect relationship applies.

  William H. Masters

  Gay, Simple, Today

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• My plea to educators and parents is that they should give some thought to the nature of the brain of a child, for the brain is a living mechanism, not a machine. In case of breakdown, it can substitute one of its parts for the function of another. But it has its limitations. It is subject to inexorable change with the passage of time.

  Wilder Penfield

  Children, Giving, Parent

  Wilder Penfield, Lamar Roberts (2014). “Speech and Brain Mechanisms”, p.257, Princeton University Press

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• Catholic theology accounts for the fact that there's evil in the world. People say, well, how could God let this happen. Well, what God did was set the mechanism in motion and then allow people to do the best they can under the circumstances that they're dealt in order to gain grace and get into heaven.

  Roger Ebert

  Order, People, Evil

  Source: progressive.org

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