Inertia Quotes

I've encountered a lot of people who sound like critics but very few who have substantive criticisms. There is a lot of skepticism, but it seems to be more a matter of inertia than it is of people having some real reason for thinking something else. (K. Eric Drexler)
I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change...The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful. View quote
James Lovelock
Ideals survive through change. They die through inertia in the face of challenge. View quote
Tony Blair
The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent. View quote
Edward Dahlberg
We must nevertheless present all possible interpretations for each observation, so that competing theories can be formulated and defended. In science, as elsewhere, intellectual inertia, the fashions of the moment, the weight of institutions, and authoritarianism are always to be feared. Heresies play an essential role by keeping our minds argumentative and alert. View quote
Hubert Reeves
Life leaps like a geyser for those who drill through the rock of inertia. View quote
Alexis Carrel
Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does. View quote
John Kenneth Galbraith
Many of us, utterly overcome by Tamas, the dark and heavy demon of inertia, are saying nowadays that it is impossible, that India is decayed, bloodless and lifeless, too weak ever to recover; that our race is doomed to extinction. It is a foolish and idle saying. No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses, no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system. View quote
Kevin Kelly (editor)
Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; no change. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is theirs. View quote
Isaac Asimov
It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition. (Northrop Frye)
The most dangerous enemy to Israel's security is the intellectual inertia of those who are responsible for security. View quote
David Ben-Gurion
We need what I have often called an ecological approach to the management of these resources and we do not have that now. We have the inertia of past habits, unsustainable habits. View quote
Maurice Strong
Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change. View quote
Milan Kundera
The essence of religion is inertia; the essence of science is change. It is the function of the one to preserve, it is the function of the other to improve. If, as in Egypt, they are firmly chained together, either science will advance, in which case the religion will be altered, or the religion will preserve its purity, and science will congeal. View quote
William Winwood Reade
I repeat: our practical choice is not between a tax-cut deficit and a budgetary surplus. It is between two kinds of deficits: a chronic deficit of inertia, as the unwanted result of inadequate revenues and a restricted economy; or a temporary deficit of transition, resulting from a tax cut designed to boost the economy, increase tax revenues, and achieve--and I believe this can be done--a budget surplus. The first type of deficit is a sign of waste and weakness; the second reflects an investment in the future. View quote
John F. Kennedy
As the proportion of people reaching higher states of consciousness increases, this inertia will decrease, and at the same time a supportive momentum in the new direction will start building up. View quote
Peter Russell
Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place. View quote
Jennifer Weiner
Being on a set where the director has lost control is just sickening. No one goes the extra mile, there's a lot of eye-rolling... it just breeds inertia. If a director is in control, the crew follow their leader. But the second anyone senses the directors are not sure, people just swoop in. View quote
Christine Vachon
Change is not overcoming inertia as much as it is redirecting, guiding, tweaking what already is and what has already happened. We must believe that we can make choices and that those choices can alter the future. View quote
Max McKeown
Well, I have also believed in empowering the individual and believe there is a degree of inertia in big government that hampers the ability to respond to a rapidly evolving crisis. (Michael Burgess)
In North America, the greatest threat to the Jewish people is not the external force of antisemitism, but the internal forces of apathy, inertia and ignorance of our own heritage. View quote
Michael Steinhardt
The city might be savage, stray dogs might share the streets with grimy urchins whose blank eyes reflected the knowledge that they might soon be covered over, blinded forever, by the same two pennies just begged from some gentleman, and no one in the fuming, fulminous boulevards of trade might know who actually ran Ambergris-or, if anyone ran it at all, but, like a renegade clock, it ran on and wound itself heedless, empowered by the insane weight of its own inertia, the weight of its own citizenry. View quote
Jeff VanderMeer
Different ways of writing the same equation can suggest very different things, even if they are logically equivalent.... In Einstein's original 1905 paper, you do not find the equation E = mc2. What you find is m = E/c2.... the title of the paper is a question: "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?" ...If we can explain mass in terms of energy, we'll be improving our description of the world. We'll need fewer ingrediants in our world-recipe. View quote
Frank Wilczek
Every socialistic type of government... produces bad art, produces social inertia, produces really unhappy people, and it's more repressive than any other kind of government. View quote
Frank Zappa