Top 130 Mechanism Quotes

Food became my coping mechanism and I’ve never been able to break that cycle.

The government has become a mechanism for distributing largess, and your census form is your ticket.

Journalism is a flawed profession, but it has a self-correcting mechanism. The rule of journalism is: talk to everybody.

History is often best told from the ground, out of a car window or in someone’s kitchen, not through some huge production mechanism or grand framing device.

It would be helpful if someone would lay out exactly the economic mechanism that gets us from yet lower interest rates to actual economic activity.

The theory of mechanism design can be thought of as the ‘engineering’ side of economic theory.

In L.A., we have a saying – ‘What do you do?’ It’s less of a question and more of a self-defense mechanism for wayward screenwriters looking to slip you a first draft, or the occasional actor looking to get in on the latest shoot. But I hate the question because of my own answer – I write about games.

The human brain long ago evolved a mechanism for rewarding us when we encountered new information: a little shot of dopamine in the brain each time we learned something new. Across evolutionary history, compulsively seeking information was adaptive behavior.

As the power of Christianity declined through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased.

That’s what Buddhism has been trying to unravel – the mechanism of happiness and suffering. It is a science of the mind.

Whether one welcomes or deplores it, nothing is more surely and exactly characteristic of modern times than the irresistible invasion of the human world by technology. Mechanism invading like a tide all the places of the earth and all forms of social activity.

I realized that nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward, as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life. Rarely seen by the naked eye, this intersection between the animal world and the plant world is truly a magic moment.

Stock market corrections, although painful at the time, are actually a very healthy part of the whole mechanism, because there are always speculative excesses that develop, particularly during the long bull market.

I think, whatever ideological coloration we think actually applies to Trump, we can be pretty confident that he sees the American state as a mechanism to make sure that people called Trump are rich forever.

As with the government failures that made 9/11 possible, neglecting to prevent the crash of ’08 was a sin of omission – less the result of deregulation per se than of disbelief in financial regulation as a legitimate mechanism.

Unlike tongs, these tweezer tongs are slim and compact, fitting into any tool crock, drawer, or even apron pocket if youre all about that quick draw. Theres no fussy locking mechanism to slow you down while cooking, no weird nooks or pockets for food or hot water to get caught in.

I gained direct knowledge of the life of the poor in big towns: I have lived the narrowing mechanism of its conditioning and feared it.

I think that fear is a mechanism a tool for control.

Leo Hurwicz is the father of mechanism design theory and has inspired much of my work, and Roger Myerson is an old friend and collaborator and a tremendous economist.

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.

Because I was a shy and awkward child, I used humour to deflect attention. It was a controlling mechanism. Because I could use it to control my image.

Empathy probably started out as a mechanism to improve maternal care. Mammalian mothers who were attentive to their young’s needs were more likely to rear successful offspring.

Most people don’t see themselves as sitting on that bottom rung as a defense mechanism. The more they blame poor people for their poverty, the further they feel from being in the same place. Even the working poor who qualify for food, childcare and housing benefits don’t see themselves as such.

Jesus Christ never preached there should be celibate priests. The only reason the church has this is because it’s a mechanism of power and control. You can control priests who are celibate.

I suppose what happened is that I spent my whole life wanting to be cool but eventually came to recognise the mechanism of how coolness works. So it’s not really that I don’t want to be cool anymore – it’s more like I’ve come to realise that coolness doesn’t exist the way I once assumed.

For me, the Sundance Institute is just an extension of something I believed in, which is creating a mechanism for new voices to have a place to develop and be heard.

In Ronald Reagan’s chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears.

In reality, it is the waste collectors, the nurses, and the cleaners whose shoulders are supporting the apex of the pyramid. They are the true mechanism of social solidarity.

I used food as a coping mechanism for many, many years, and it was my best friend for a long time.

How accurately can the law fix the crime? There has to be a mechanism for very fast action. The law is like this: catch them and punish them.

When you bring telomerase RNA levels down by using a mechanism that targets the RNA for destruction, the cells which were running on very high telomerase levels are now running on a lean diet of telomerase.

America is fundamentally exceptional. No one in the history of the world had ever done anything to compare with what the Founders did, creating a fragile mechanism by which men and women could actually govern themselves.

When my wife and I met, I couldn’t talk to her – and my defense mechanism is sarcasm. I belittle someone with verbal pokes and prods. I did it to her out of complete awe. When friends introduced us, I said ‘Hi’ – and turned my back. Later, I called my mom and best friend and said, ‘I think I just met my wife.’

As a journalist, it is so easy to get hardened when you see so many stories that are disturbing. Sometimes it’s just your survival mechanism that makes you hardened to some of it.

Sometimes, I remember, for action continuity or to get all warmed up for an action scene before giving a close-up or saying a dialogue, I would do push-ups. I didn’t know any other way to get my body mechanism going.

Comedy is a coping mechanism, and it helps us stay alive.

Trade accords had been a staple of the post-World War II world, providing a mechanism for economic growth, development, and association with friends and allies, and a means of reining in would-be adversaries who otherwise would have little incentive to act with restraint.

One of the big things coming out of healthcare reform is a thing called the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act (CLASS) which is a mechanism to reimburse people staying at home for technology and services that allow them to stay at home.

I think there is a good deal of promise in those discussions as well. I think there is a range of matters that might be discussed between NATO and Russia that can provide a mechanism for talking through these issues, a way to give reassurance on these issues.

Lying is not only a defense mechanism; it’s also a coping mechanism and a survival technique.

Wikileaks is a mechanism to maximize the flow of information to maximize the amount of action leading to just reform.

I gravitate toward the law, I think, certainly more times than not, because it’s our best mechanism for legislating human behavior, and morality, and ethics.

I think I came to see Islam, or at least one part of Islam, as an important defense mechanism against the commercialization of the world.

I believe that we can ‘sense’ the future. We just haven’t yet established the mechanism allowing it to happen.

Faith itself is a horrible mechanism that stunts the growth of ideas. It also stunts the act of questioning, and it does this by pushing the idea that you have to have faith – and that nothing has to be proven.

Food is sort of like the Jewish sense of humor, a defense mechanism. It is one of the things that helped the Jews survive through 2,000 years of an often very harsh Diaspora.

We are like the mechanism of a watch: each part is essential.

The unambigious fact is that U.S. capitalism is a mechanism for looting the many for the benefit of the few.

We are neither prepared to deal with dubious companies nor have the mechanism for swift investigation. What’s more we don’t even have a culture, which imposes stringent, debilitating and deterrent punishment on wrong doers.

I see nothing wrong with the human trait to desire. In fact, I consider it integral to our success mechanism. Becoming attached to what we desire is what causes the trouble. If you must have it in order to be happy, then you are denying the happiness of the here and now.