Reflexes Quotes - Page 4

• It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else.

  Noam Chomsky

  Government, Action, Controversial

  Noam Chomsky (2007). “Interventions”, p.71, City Lights Publishers

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• I'm trying to create artwork that makes people, and myself, think about judgment as a reflex. This is something that must be changed.

  eL Seed

  Thinking, People, Trying

  "eL Seed’s New Home". Interview with Emily McDermott, www.interviewmagazine.com. January 28, 2016.

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• Similar (of course, far from identical) irritations in similar conditions call out similar reflexes; the more powerful the irritation, the sooner it overcomes personal peculiarities. To a tickle, people react differently, but to a red-hot iron, alike. As a steam-hammer converts a sphere and a cube alike into sheet metal, so under the blow of too great and inexorable events resistances are smashed and the boundaries of "individuality" lost.

  Leon Trotsky

  Powerful, Blow, Iron

  Leon Trotsky, Max Eastman (2008). “History of the Russian Revolution”, p.70, Haymarket Books

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• When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene. It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.

  Georges Bataille

  Blood, Criminals, Red

  Georges Bataille (1985). “Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939”, p.8, Manchester University Press

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• Dealing with architecture brings me very close to the state of mind required to make pictures. One also needs an old seeing eye, appropriate reflexes which embrace sensitive observations coupled with appropriate emotional responses.

  Max Dupain

  Eye, Emotional, Mind

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• Revenge is the thinking man's reflex, a complex blend of action and consistency no other animal species has so far succeeded in evolving. Evolutionary speaking, the practice of taking revenge has shown itself to the so effective that only the most vengeful of us have survived.

  Jo Nesbo

  Revenge, Animal, Men

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• I tried playing electric for awhile and it just didn't work out. My reflexes are centered on the six string acoustic. I just played the electric too hard and it sounded awful, so I gave it up.

  Tom Rush

  Work Out, Awful, Acoustics

  "Tom Rush Interview: Celebrating 50 Years of Storytelling and Music". Interview with Ray Shasho, www.classicrockhereandnow.com. November 26, 2012.

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• The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation. Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes and driven by the human ego, both warden and prisoner attempt meagerly to compete with God. All are intractably skeptical of what they do not understand. We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Dark, Thinking, Persistence

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• If we denote excitation as an end-effect by the sign plus (+), and inhibition as end-effect by the sign minus (-), such a reflex as the scratch-reflex can be termed a reflex of double-sign, for it develops excitatory end-effect and then inhibitory end-effect even during the duration of the exciting stimulus.

  Charles Scott Sherrington

  Scratches, Duration, Ends

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• Babies are equipped at birth with a number of instinctive reflexes and behavior patterns that cause them to spend their first several years trying to kill themselves. If your home contains a sharp, toxic object, your baby will locate it; if your home contains no such object, your baby will try to obtain one via mail order.

  Dave Barry

  Funny, Baby, Children

  Dave Barry (1984). “Babies and Other Hazards of Sex: How to Make a Tiny Person in Only 9 Months, with Tools You Probably Have Around the Home”, p.18, Rodale

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• If he failed the first time he took his driver's licence test, it was mainly because he started an argument with the examiner in an ill-timed effort to prove that nothing could be more humiliating to a rational creature than being required to encourage the development of a base conditional reflex by stopping at a red light when there was not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled. He was more circumspect the next time, and passed.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Light, Effort, Soul

  Vladimir Nabokov (2012). “Pnin”, p.85, Penguin UK

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• There's a theory that snoring at night in sleep is a subconscious defence reflex-a warning sound that frightened potential predators away from the mouth of the cave when our lower-paleolithic ancestors huddled in vulnerable sleep. That group of nomads, cameleers, sheep and goat herders, farmers, and guerilla fighters lent credibility to the idea, for they snored so thunderously and with such persistent ferocity through the long, cold night that they would've frightened a pride of ravenous lions into scattering like startled mice.

  Gregory David Roberts

  Sleep, Pride, Night

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• Caring is a reflex. Someone slips, your arm goes out. A car is in the ditch, you join others and push... You live, you help.

  This is quotes copyright © By Pumpkin Limited

  Ram Dass

  Caring, Arms, Helping

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• A bird maintains itself in the air by imperceptible balancing, when near to the mountains or lofty ocean crags; it does this by means of the curves of the winds which as they strike against these projections, being forced to preserve their first impetus bend their straight course towards the sky with divers revolutions, at the beginning of which the birds come to a stop with their wings open, receiving underneath themselves the continual buffetings of the reflex courses of the winds.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Ocean, Mean, Science

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• Until I became a parent, I thought children just naturally knew how to catch a ball, that catching was an instinctive biological reflex that all children are born with, like knowing how to operate a remote control or getting high fevers in distant airports.

  Dave Barry

  Funny, Baby, Children

  Dave Barry (1994). “The World According to Dave Barry”, Outlet

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• The religious world is but a reflex of the real world.

  Karl Marx

  Religious, Real, World

  Karl Marx, Jon Elster (1986). “Karl Marx: A Reader”, p.71, Cambridge University Press

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• To identify yourself with your personality is more or less a reflex. You must see, when the reflex comes up, that it is a kind of feeling of insecurity; you are looking for a hold.

  Jean Klein

  Personality, Feelings, Insecurity

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• I shudder to think. I might wear lace collars and laugh flower petals and pearls. People might try to pat me. I see them think it. My height triggers the puppy-kitten reflex- Must touch-and I've found that since you can't electrify yourself like a fence, the next best thing is to have murderer's eyes.

  Laini Taylor

  Flower, Eye, Thinking

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• A company needs to have good business reflexes, to be able to marshal its forces in a crisis or in response to any unplanned event.

  Bill Gates

  Events, Needs, Able

  Bill Gates (2009). “Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy”, p.19, Hachette UK

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• Propaganda tries first of all to create conditioned reflexes in the individual so that certain words, signs, or symbols, even certain persons or facts, provoke unfailing reactions...The important thing is that when the time is ripe, the individual can be thrown into action by the utilization of the psychological levers that have been set up.

  Jacques Ellul

  Important, Trying, Levers

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• Acting is a sport. On stage you must be ready to move like a tennis player on his toes. Your concentration must be keen, your reflexes sharp; your body and mind are in top gear, the chase is on. Acting is energy. In the theatre people pay to see energy.

  Clive Swift

  Sports, Moving, Player

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• Compassion and pity are very different. Whereas compassion reflects the yearning of the heart to merge and take on some of the suffering, pity is a controlled set of thoughts designed to assure separateness. Compassion is the spontaneous response of love; pity, the involuntary reflex of fear.

  This is quotes copyright © By Pumpkin Limited

  Ram Dass

  Heart, Compassion, Suffering

  Ram Dass, Paul Gorman (2011). “How Can I Help?”, p.62, Knopf

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• I'm not a reflex goalie. I try to make as many stops as possible with with my stomach.

  Jean-Sebastien Giguere

  Trying, Goalies, Stomach

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• It seems to me that you are solving a problem which goes beyond the limits of physiology in too simple a way. Physiology has realized its problem with fortitude, breaking man down into endless actions and counteractions and reducing him to a crossing, a vortex of reflex acts. Let it now permit sociology to restore him as a whole. Sociology will wrest man from the anatomical theatre and return him to history.

  Alexander Herzen

  Simple, Men, Theatre

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• May never glorious sun reflex his beams
  Upon the country where you make abode!
  But darkness and the gloomy shade of death
  Environ you till mischief and despair
  Drive you to break your necks or hang yourselves.

  William Shakespeare

  Country, Darkness, Despair

  William Shakespeare, Charles Symmons (1843). “The Dramatic Works and Poems”, p.26

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