Defensive Mechanisms Quotes

You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her.

Christianity has a built-in defense system: anything that questions a belief, no matter how logical the argument is, is the work of Satan by the very fact that it makes you question a belief. It's a very interesting defense mechanism and the only way to get by it -- and believe me, I was raised Southern Baptist -- is to take massive amounts of mushrooms, sit in a field, and just go, "Show me.".

Many of us develop different flavors of cynicism that we work hard to resist because they can be lazy mental shortcuts.

The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.

I can't be so guarded up all the time. I know it's not healthy.

Rose goblins are built like porcupines - if you rub them the right way, you don't have to worry about the spines. They're sort of like people in that regard, too.​

The female of all species are most dangerous when they appear to retreat.

I think I can be closed in. I can close this outer shell, cut myself off and be quite cold. I can cut other people off if I need to. I don't think I'm angry, though... Maybe my wife would disagree.

You have those walls up all around you...Come a day you gonna want to tear them down brick by brick and gonna find that the cement is all hard. What you gonna do then?

Celebrities used to be found in clusters, like oysters - and with much the same defensive mechanisms.

Thought reflexes get conditioned very strongly, and they are very hard to change. And the also interfere. A reflex may connect to the endorphins and produce an impulse to hold that whole pattern forther. In other words, it produces a defensive reflex. Not merely is it stuck because it's chemically so well built up, but also there is a defensive reflex which defends against evidence which might weaken it. Thus it all happens, one reflex after another after another. It's just a vast system of reflexes. And they form a 'structure' as they get more rigid.

Whenever a woman would come too close, I would cut her off. Part of that was vindictive - but that was totally subconscious.

I didn't listen to half of the criticism I received. I just didn't let it enter my brain.

My mom is an excellent mom. She knows I am irascible, prickly, and antisocial. She knows that most human interaction makes me tired and that I either scare people away with precise invectives or trot out the fakest, nicest skinjob of myself because it requires zero effort.

Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.