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.
Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.
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.
Just think of the trust that often exists in soldiers. Within their own unit, you could say they have to trust each other. A spirit of camaraderie builds up and, in the end, they will risk their lives for each other. They may even go so far as to dehumanise the other, enemy group - a mechanism you can also observe in chimps.
The government has become a mechanism for distributing largess, and your census form is your ticket.
I don't have a shred of regret about entering the exchange-rate mechanism.
I was the fat kid, so as a defense mechanism, I was the jokester.
Music for me is not just being on a stage and singing. It's my coping mechanism.
Every brand of religion maintains, and is, a permanent mechanism for transmitting ideas and values - whether one regards those values as admirable or ridiculous. Secularist organizations, with their generally looser, nonhierarchical structures, lack the power to hand down and disseminate their heritage in such a systematic way.
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.
There's this quote by a writer, Emil Cioran, he's a Romanian writer. He says that you should only put things in books that you would never dare to say to people in real life. So there is that feeling of acute embarrassment, or that you've been too revealing. I think it's some kind of survival mechanism where I never think of the reader, ever. Because then I would start censoring myself.
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. '
Fashion has always been my defense mechanism.
One mechanism of repression is the grand jury.
I've never known a Philadelphian who wasn't a downright 'character'; possibly a defense mechanism resulting from the dullness of their native habitat.
The first point one has to get straight in discussions like this, is that ID is not the opposite of evolution. Rather, it is the opposite of Darwinism, which says life evolved by an utterly unguided, undirected mechanism. If god directed the process of evolution, or rigged the universe to produce complex life, then that is not Darwinism - it is intelligent design.
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.
All the great masters in the world have been saying only one thing down the centuries, "Have your own mind and have your own individuality. Don't be a part of the crowd; don't be a wheel in the whole mechanism of a vast society. Be individual, on your own. Live life with your own eyes; listen to music with your own ears. " But we are not doing anything with our own ears, with our own eyes, with our own minds; everything is being taught, and we are following it.
Lying is not only a defense mechanism; it's also a coping mechanism and a survival technique.
The question is really how do we think seriously about this mechanism called a market. It ought to be determining not values but prices.