Survival Mechanism Quotes & Sayings

Compartmentalization is an unconscious psychological defense mechanism employed to avoid cognitive dissonance. — Zack Love

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

Mack once told me that he used to speak his mind more freely in his younger years, but he admitted that most of such talk was a survival mechanism to cover his hurts; he often ended up spewing his pain on everyone around him. He says that he had a way of pointing out people's faults and humiliating them while maintaining his own sense of false power and control. Not too endearing. — Wm. Paul Young

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

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

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

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

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

Tiresome people, but he knew it was only human nature to believe it best to ignore suffering, to focus on your own good fortune. The human survival mechanism: to say your prayers, thank your gods, and hold your breath when you passed the slums. The sweet poison of privelege, wasn't it? To think blindness a preferable condition. — Sunil Yapa

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

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

Bad things happen. And the human brain is especially adept at making sure that we keep track of these events. This is an adaptive mechanism important for survival. — David Perlmutter

What I had was classic short-term PTSD. From an evolutionary perspective, it's exactly the response you want to have when your life is in danger: you want to be vigilant, you want to avoid situations where you are not in control, you want to react to strange noises, you want to sleep lightly and wake easily, you want to have flashbacks and nightmares that remind you of specific threats to your life, and you want to be, by turns, angry and depressed. Anger keeps you ready to fight, and depression keeps you from being too active and putting yourself in more danger. Flashbacks also serve to remind you of the danger that's out there - a "highly efficient single-event survival-learning mechanism," as one researcher termed it. All humans react to trauma in this way, and most mammals do as well. It may be unpleasant, but it's preferable to getting killed. Like — Sebastian Junger

Fear is a part of life. It's a warning mechanism. That's all. It tells you when there's danger around. Its job is to help you survive. Not cripple you into being unable to do it. — Jim Butcher

More panic. More emergencies and disasters. Soon, emergencies fell into a sort of natural ranking: drop-everything emergencies, do-what-you-can emergencies, and you'll just-have-to-wait emergencies. Disasters, too, had their own ratings: unavoidable, did-the-best-we-could, my fault/your fault. Then there were godlike moments when a decision had to be made as to who most deserved to die. By the afternoon of her second day, Dtui wondered whether her heart had shrunk. She felt less. People had become less human. Death had become less of a tragedy. Her patients weren't blacksmiths or housewives, they were percentages. "With this little skill and this little pharmaceutical backup, this patient - let's call her number seven - has a forty percent chance of survival." It amazed and saddened her that, in order to do her job properly, she had to stop caring. — Colin Cotterill

Funny how easily we forget the good times while the nightmares haunt us. Guess that's a survival mechanism. We're not here to be happy; we're just here to be here. I — Hugh Howey

Over-population is a phenomenon connected with the survival of the unfit, and it is a mechanism which has created conditions favourable to the survival of the unfit and the elimination of the fit. — William Ralph Inge

The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable. — Julian Barnes

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

Lying is not only a defense mechanism; it's also a coping mechanism and a survival technique. — Monica Raymund

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

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

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

When I read about how 200 people died on a polar expedition, I wonder why they didn't get to know the Inuit people who were around and presumably know something about surviving in the Arctic after living there for thousands of years. Talking to people is a survival mechanism. — Tim Cahill

Survival in scarcity dictates nastiness with a rival clan, but also dictates goodness towards our own clan whose support is vital to acquire or defend the necessary scarcities.

Man's nastiness or goodness is not his fault or merit;
They both create the vital coping mechanism to his environment of scarcity. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

Pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival. — Robert A. Heinlein

Fantasy isn't about escape; it's a survival mechanism. It's a way to deal with things that are so much bigger than you are. So I think fantasy is special, something to be cherished and protected because it's a very fragile thing and without it, we're so defenseless, we're paralyzed. — The Martian Child David Gerrold

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

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

Acting is a reflex, a mechanism for development and survival ... It isn't 'second nature,' it is 'first nature.' — Declan Donnellan

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

It's for survival. You need to be prepared for novel experiences because often they signal danger. If you live in a jungle full of fragrant flowers, you have to stop being so overwhelmed by the lovely smell because otherwise you couldn't smell a predator. That's why your brain is considered a discounting mechanism. It's literally a matter of survival." "That's cool. — Maria Semple

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

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