Complacency Quotes

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. (Andy Grove)
It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master. View quote
Francis Fukuyama
An audience shouldn't listen with complacency. View quote
Peter Maxwell Davies
You don't want too much fear in a market, because people will be blinded to some very good buying opportunities. You don't want too much complacency because people will be blinded to some risk. View quote
Ron Chernow
It is through an "intimate cessation of all intellectual operations” that the mind is laid bare. If nor, discourse maintains it in its little complacency. ... The difference between inner experience and philosophy resides principally in this: that in experience, ... what counts is no longer the statement of wind, but the wind. View quote
Georges Bataille
In general, the nightmare quality of Marx's thought gives it, in this bedevilled age, an air of greater reality than the gentle complacency of the orthodox academics. Yet he, at the same time, is more encouraging than they, for he releases hope as well as terror from Pandora's box, while they preach only the gloomy doctrine that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. View quote
Joan Robinson
I have absolutely no idea what my generation did to enrich our democracy. We dropped the ball. We entered a period of complacency and closed our eyes to the public corruption of our democracy. View quote
Wynton Marsalis
Sometimes success needs interruption to regain focus and shake off complacency. View quote
Lennox Lewis
Mr. President, there comes to a time in the history of nations when fear and complacency allow power to accumulate and liberty and privacy to suffer. That time is now. And I will not let the PATRIOT Act, the most un-patriotic of acts, go unchallenged. View quote
Rand Paul
Love... no such thing. Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together, that's not love. That's stupidity or selfishness or fear. Love doesn't exist. Self interest exists, attachment based on personal gain exists, complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented, that's certain. View quote
Arthur Rimbaud
Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency. (Franz Kafka)
A higher rate of urgency does not imply ever-present panic, anxiety, or fear. It means a state in which complacency is virtually absent. View quote
John Kotter
The age which we live in is not suited to idle complacency or to pleasant dreams of past greatness. View quote
Vincent Massey
We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior. View quote
John Stott
The biggest mistake to me is complacency. View quote
Bonnie Hammer
The young person isn't certain that love can be real; the middle-aged man is only discovering that it is; and the older person seems so sure of it. I was interested in the way that many of us go through the whole of our lives staying with someone just out of complacency, because leaving isn't easy. View quote
Conor McPherson
The greatest obstacle to those who hope to reform American education is complacency. View quote
Diane Ravitch
The smug complacency of technology adverts disguises a pretty mixed picture, with too many people not connected, too many passive users of technologies designed for interactive, and far too much talk about empowerment but far too little action to make it happen. View quote
Geoff Mulgan
History shows that all protest movements rely on symbols - boycotts, strikes, sit-ins, flags, songs. Symbolic action on whatever scale - from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to wearing a simple wristband - is designed to disrupt our everyday complacency and force people to think. View quote
Hugh Evans
Our concerns about what we saw in Australia: an economy clearly tied to China has hitched its wagon to the tail of the tiger. In terms of the general complacency, what we heard over and over from investors and clients and potential clients is, 'yes, yes, there are some excesses, but the government will figure out a way.' View quote
James Chanos
When a great team loses through complacency, it will constantly search for new and more intricate explanations to explain away defeat. (Pat Riley)
On the contrary, it might even be a projection of what the truth is of the Bush Administration's complacency and ineptitude on the terrorism in its first 9 months in office. View quote
Sidney Blumenthal
For me, faith is more about aspiration than complacency - the smug satisfaction that other people find distasteful. View quote
Tom Hollander
Despite the advances we have made in our 12 years of freedom, we must also recognise the reality that we still have a long way to go... We should never allow ourselves the dangerous luxury of complacency, believing that we are immune to the conflicts that we see and have seen in so many parts of the world. View quote
Thabo Mbeki
An evolving discipline–whether it be history or economics or astrophysics or immunology–is ever dynamically changing. Two steps forward and X steps back, so to speak. Periodically, the scholarly group registers more or less self-confidence, self-esteem, and complacency. We careerists are happiest when recent past achievements have seemed to be successful, but when still there are completable tasks dimly visible ahead. View quote
Paul Samuelson