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Quotes About Mechanisms

Machines belong to the second category of inventions, that of new and more or less complex devices or mechanisms deployed for both stationary use and transportation.
~ Vaclav Smil
obsessions: they're essentially defence mechanisms that protect patients from looking at what really terrifies them.
~ Catherine Gildiner
The Maoist mechanisms of social control have been loosened. A totalitarian state has become merely an authoritarian one.
~ Gordon G. Chang
Comfort is not the objective in a visionary company. Indeed, visionary companies install powerful mechanisms to create /dis/comfort--to obliterate complacency--and thereby stimulate change and improvement /before/ the external world demands it.
~ James C. Collins
Turning Goals into Results: The Power of Catalytic Mechanisms," Harvard Business Review, July–August, 1999.
~ James C. Collins
The need to deal with pathogens has driven the evolution of the vertebrate immune system, so it should not be surprising that experiments with infectious agents have often illuminated key elements of the underlying mechanisms.
~ Peter C. Doherty
Market mechanisms are totally irrelevant when resources are used to serve a larger purpose, especially for the underserved, unserved, or marginalised.
~ Kapil Sibal
In principle, if you understood the mechanisms of keeping things repaired, you could keep things going indefinitely.
~ Cynthia Kenyon
We know a great deal about the molecular mechanisms of evolution and about the history of life on our planet, but far less about which parts of this history are chance – trajectories that could have played out quite differently on other planets – and which bits are dictated by physical laws or constraints.
~ Nick Lane
For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments.
~ Noam Chomsky
as efficient as communications' mechanisms become, they are still, as they have always been, subject to the overwhelming tendency for entropy to increase, for information to leak in transit, unless certain external agents are introduced to control it. I have already referred to an interesting view of language made by a cybernetically-minded philologist—that speech is a joint game by the talker and the listener against the forces of confusion.
~ Norbert Wiener
As for the actual causation of neuroses, apart from constitutional elements, whether somatic or psychic in nature, such feedback mechanisms as anticipatory anxiety seem to be a major pathogenic factor. A given symptom is responded to by a phobia, the phobia triggers the symptom, and the symptom, in turn, reinforces the phobia.
~ Viktor E. Frankl
How can we dare to predict the behavior of man? We may predict the movements of a machine, of an automaton; more than this, we may even try to predict the mechanisms or "dynamisms" of the human psyche as well. But man is more than psyche.
~ Viktor E. Frankl
centered psychotherapy.) At the same time, logotherapy defocuses all the vicious-circle formations and feedback mechanisms which play such a great role in the development of neuroses. Thus, the typical self-centeredness of the neurotic is broken up instead of being continually fostered and reinforced.
~ Viktor E. Frankl
There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations. But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my defense mechanisms, nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my reaction formations.
~ Viktor Emil Frankl
As is often the case, an individual who has been racially oppressed may be blind that the same mechanisms of exclusion and denigration are at work in gender oppression.
~ Chantal Zabus
Say what you will about it, Hell is story friendly. If you want a compelling story, put your protagonist among the damned. The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.
~ Charles Baxter
The microscopic pieces were perfectly clear; the macroscopic behavior remained a mystery. The tradition of looking at systems locally—isolating the mechanisms and then adding them together—was beginning to break down.
~ James Gleick
I consider creativity to be a more non-rational, subconscious thing. You have a relationship to your creativity - you can feed it with content, with some rational prodding and sleep and things like that, but the mechanisms by which your creativity work are largely unknown.
~ Ze Frank
The answers to all a startup's challenges are out there. By setting up the right mechanisms for gathering feedback, the road to success can be a less bumpy ride.
~ Jay Samit
see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.
~ Walter Isaacson
After his excursion into comparative anatomy, Leonardo proceeded to delve deeper into the mechanisms of humans as they smile or grimace (fig. 111). He focused on the role of various nerves in sending signals to the muscles, and he asked a question that was central to his art: Which of these are cranial nerves originating in the brain, and which are spinal nerves?
~ Walter Isaacson
In explaining the amazing mechanisms of life, little things matter. And very little things matter a lot.
~ Walter Isaacson
The defeat of Darwinism in the face of science can be reviewed under three basic topics: 1) The theory cannot explain how life originated on Earth. 2) No scientific finding shows that the "evolutionary mechanisms" proposed by the theory have any evolutionary power at all. 3) The fossil record proves the exact opposite of what the theory suggests. In this section, we will examine these three basic points in general outlines:
~ Harun Yahya