Survival Mechanism Quotes

What women have done is developed a survival mechanism, and it's a fascinating one and it's been effective and justified, in my opinion. That is the ability to manipulate men sexually. ~ Frederick Lenz

I've always been a student of different ways of looking at the world, different religions. That's been part of my survival mechanism, and also part of my curiosity as a person. ~ Assata Shakur

Dissmell is the affect that monitors our drive for hunger. It was primarily developed as a survival mechanism. As we've become more complex, its use has extended interpersonally. Prejudice and rage against strangers (the ones who are not like us) have terrible consequences. Dissmell is a major sexuality factor. Disgust follows the same pattern as dissmell. Originally a hunger drive auxiliary, it has been extended to interpersonal relations. Divorces are often dominated by disgust. Victims of abuse carry various degrees of anger and disgust. Rapists who kill operate on disgust, anger and sex fused together. ~ John Bradshaw

The Jews are trying to destroy all other cultures ... as a survival mechanism ... the only Nazi country in the world is Israel. ~ David Duke

Your very success is what's going to destroy you. The survival mechanism that you've developed is the very thing which will cause the downfall of your subtle physical body. ~ Frederick Lenz

One day [Rabbi Spear] talked about his theory of happiness. He proposed that human feelings respond only to contrast and change, not to constancy, just as eyesight responds to contrasts of light and dark and to movement. The rabbi speculated that if emotions are similar to eyesight and other senses, then perhaps emotions were developed by nature as a survival mechanism. ~ Alan Lightman

If life is really as purposeless, unfair, and uncontrollable ... ,then life is simply too terrifying to be managed. So we search for a redemptive narrative ... That search is a survival mechanism. ~ Amanda Ripley

The podcast movement was really a creative survival mechanism for standup comics. ~ Chris Hardwick

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. ~ Linda Vester

A long time ago he believed that he was above the men chasing him; capitulating to their secret desires and dark fears was what he did to survive, nothing more and nothing less. But now he understood that all that reasoning was nothing more than a self-assessing loop which he had used as a survival mechanism. It had run constantly but never actually went anywhere; like a rat on a flywheel, all action, no forward motion. ~ Brandon Shire

No one ever thinks they're awful, even people who really actually are. It's some sort of survival mechanism. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

It turns out our brain is sensitive, maybe too sensitive, to motion. It's a survival mechanism. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Self-mutilation is a very different issue to suicide. It is a controlled pain personal to you, allowing you to live/exist to some degree. ~ Richy Edwards

Dryness promotes the formation of flower buds ... flowering is, after all, not an aesthetic contribution, but a survival mechanism. ~ Ann Zwinger

Denial can be a pathology or a survival mechanism - and sometimes it's both. ~ Jane Fonda

Daddy," she says again, this time putting more of a needy whine into her voice. It is the thing that has swayed him, these times when he has come near to turning on her: remembering that she is his little girl. Reminding him that he has been, up to today, a good father.

It is a manipulation. Something of her is warped out of true by this moment, and from now on all her acts of affection toward her father will be calculated, performative. Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows. ~ N.K. Jemisin

I laugh when I see people in pain. Sometimes I think it is a defense mechanism from childhood, where you're in so much pain you have to laugh. It is a survival mechanism. ~ Andy Dick

Eating – overeating – saved me. It comforted me when I was at the mercy of grown-ups who didn't know how to give what I needed. Food was something to which I had ready access, and with it I cleverly fashioned a survival mechanism that pulled me back from the edge of insanity. – a young MacGuyver of angst and junk food. ~ Kim Brittingham

Any kid will tell you that, yes, their music is both an escape and a survival mechanism, and that sometimes the music givesbthem hope and inspiration. It doesn't just placate and pacify. ~ David Byrne

I don't think of myself as a terribly confident person. But I have a survival mechanism that was instilled in me by my mother. ~ Naomi Watts

How can the public choose sides, when one side has nothing left to surrender? Not until the right is prepared to lose on principles will we ever hope to win this culture war on which the survival of our nation depends. ~ Don Feder

Like Beji, our country is a nation whose citizens has employed crooked means of survival, lives in the expense of others, cares the least about their compatriots, and are ever more than willing to do anything conceivable to plunge every vulnerable life into a pitch-dark abyss! It is, you will realize, a lovely den of hungry wolves whose ugly claws often extend a cold handshake to every beggar in the next turn... ~ Levi Cheruo Cheptora

Most people are preoccupied with survival in all its subtle forms, and so they reflect primarily fear, anger, and a desire for gain. They have not learned that the state of lovingness is the most powerful of all survival tools. ~ David R. Hawkins

The lady is almost the only picturesque survival in a social order which tends less and less to tolerate the exceptional ... In the age-long war between men and women, she is a hostage in the enemy's camp. Her fortunes do not rise and fall with those of women but with those of men. ~ Emily James Smith Putnam

The Reservoir plan is an engineering mechanism applied to the field of economics, and in its essence it has nothing to do with democracy or any other political philosophy. ~ Benjamin Graham

We do not accept that human society should be constructed on the basis of a savage principle of the survival of the fittest ~ Thabo Mbeki

Emotional abuse can pose a threat to a person's psychological survival, particularly if that person is a child and if the emotional abuse is chronic and severe. Threat of abandonment is experienced by some as a threat to physical and/or psychological survival. This is particularly so if the victim is dependent on the person threatening abandonment, as a child may be. Incest is a form of physical and emotional abuse that threatens a child's psychological survival and sometimes even her or his physical survival. Extreme sexual or emotional abuse may produce fragmentation of identity, as in multiple personality, or psychic annihilation, as in psychosis. Threat to psychological survival can also occur, for example, when someone threatens to kill your children, when someone continues to sexually abuse your children and there is nothing you can do to stop it, or when someone prevents you from seeing your children. ~ Dee L.R. Graham

I also came across the word neoteny, which means "remaining young." It's something which we as humans have developed into a survival trait. Other animals, when they are young, have a curiosity about the world, a flexibility of response, and an ability to play which they lose as they grow up. As a species we have retained it. As a species, we are forever sticking our fingers into the electric socket of the universe to see what will happen next. It is a trait that will either save us or kill us, but it is what makes us human beings. I would rather be in the company of people who look at Mars than people who contemplate humanity's navel - other worlds are better than fluff. ~ Anonymous

Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. ~ Andrew Solomon

In my considered opinion, the profit to be made by permanent settlement in space is nothing less than the survival of industrial civilization, and therefore the survival of nearly the entire human race, along with such amenities as peace, freedom, enough to eat, and the chance to reach a high age in good health. ~ Poul Anderson

The human psyche is a self-correcting mechanism. ~ Laurie Nadel

I hold that we have a very imperfect knowledge of the works of nature till we view them as works of God, - not only as works of mechanism, but works of intelligence, not only as under laws, but under a Lawgiver, wise and good. ~ James McCosh

Trade helps bring us products cheaply, but there is no guarantee whatsoever to assume that it will allow us to replace the jobs that have been lost, and there is no mechanism under productivity that says that, either. ~ Tim Bishop

And in these times, people were always in danger of becoming less than fully themselves. If you terrorised them enough, they became something else, something diminished and reduced: mere techniques for survival. And so, it was not just an anxiety, but often a brute fear that he experienced: the fear that love's last days had come. ~ Julian Barnes

tattooed on Kirsten's arm, "Survival is insufficient," is from Star Trek: Voyager, episode 122, which aired for the first time in September 1999 and was written by Ronald D. Moore. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

Voters, activists, and political leaders of the present day are in the position of medieval doctors. They hold simple, prescientific theories about the workings of society and the causes of social problems, from which they derive a variety of remedies – almost all of which prove either ineffectual or harmful. Society is a complex mechanism whose repair, if possible at all, would require a precise and detailed understanding of a kind that no one today possesses. Unsatisfying as it may seem, the wisest course for political agents is often simply to stop trying to solve society's problems. ~ Michael Huemer

A man glided out of the limo. He was tall, pale as a statue. Sable hair fell in tousled curls to his shoulders. He was dressed in a pair of opalescent butterfly wings that rose from his shoulders, fastened to him by some mysterious mechanism. He wore white leather gloves, their gauntlet cuffs decorated in winding silver designs, and similar designs were set around his calves, down to his sandals. At his side hung a sword, delicately made, the handle wrought as though out of glass. The only other thing he had on was a loincloth of some soft, white cloth. He had the body for it. Muscle, but not too much of it, good set of shoulders, and the pale skin wasn't darkened anywhere by hair. Hell's bells, I noticed how good he looked. ~ Jim Butcher

This life required scars,...
Some were on the outside, and some they carried on the inside.

But scars weren't shameful. They meant survival. They meant putting in work.

They meant sticking around and getting through the hard stuff just on the chance that things could get better. ~ T.S. Joyce

In World War II, some Japanese soldiers preferred to take their own lives rather become prisoners of war. In Saipan hundreds of civilians jumped to their deaths over cliffs in order to avoid falling into American hands. Even in life-or-death situations cultural ties and duties often outweigh the instinct for survival. This is why people die in the attempt to rescue a dog from drowning, or decide to become suicide bombers. ~ Harald Welzer

Governance as strategy . For some researchers, the central purpose of governance is strategic. It is a mechanism for ensuring that the goals and objectives of the board of directors are implemented. ~ Anonymous

The career world is like an ecological system: People occupy particular fields within which they must compete for resources and survival. The more people there are crowded into a space, the harder it becomes to thrive there. Working in such a field will tend to wear you out as you struggle to get attention, to play the political games, to win scarce resources for yourself. You spend so much time at these games that you have little time left over for true mastery. You are seduced into such fields because you see others there making a living, treading the familiar path. You are not aware of how difficult such a life can be. ~ Robert Greene

They no longer formed a single group, united in the common cause of survival. Now their lives had diverged again into a score of independent aims and ambitions. Humanity had swallowed them up once more, and the ocean swallows a raindrop. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

Then again, given that human history appears to be defined by a succession of more or less corrupt ruling elites, and if we are to assume that such corruption (and its spread throughout society) is the mechanism by which a civilization attracts cosmic catastrophe, blaming and deposing the elite is a good solution. The problem, however, is that the underlying mechanism is not understood by the people, which means that they lack the knowledge that, if they are to prevent further destruction, they must, at all costs, prevent the establishment of any future corrupt elite. ~ Laura Knight-Jadczyk

Death is natural and necessary, but not just. It is a random force of nature; survival is equally accidental. Each loss is an occasion to remember that survival is a gift. ~ Harriet McBryde Johnson

I think we're probably more unified than ever before because we're in a battle for survival. Not only for survival as the Republican Party, but survival of the check and balance system in our government. ~ Bill Scott

But it's the wrestler who can put the fatigue out of his mind and break through the "wall," like a marathon runner after 18 or 20 miles, who will survive. The key to that survival is in hard workouts that develop mental confidence to the point where you won't submit to fatigue and pain descending upon you. ~ Lou Banach

Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanisms by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science is, in fact, anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation. A website that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Hayden isn't offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion. ~ Edward Snowden

On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. ~ Aldo Leopold

I'm proud of them, in a way. My little gold stars for surviving. For thriving. They aren't just mistakes. ~ A.R. Kahler

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. ~ Rob Manuel

Show me a man who has no interest in his own good, and I'll show you a man who is not in touch with his own humanity."

~R. Alan Woods [2013] ~ R. Alan Woods