Quotes About Stagnation

If 'pro' is the opposite of 'con' what is the opposite of 'progress'?

Movement isn't progress.

It's really a drag to do the same project over and over again.

For too long I had existed, not really going anywhere and not standing still. I just lived, always in search of something that seemed just out of my range of vision.

He was in an eddy again, a deep, lethargic gulf, without desire to work or write, love or dissipate.

America has become what Francis Fukuyama calls a "vetocracy." The system of checks and balances, replicated at every level of government, ensures that someone, somewhere can always block any positive action. The United States has become a nation of naysayers.

America has become what Francis Fukuyama calls a "vetocracy.

Whole months have passed during which I haven't lived, but have merely endured, caught between the office and physiology, marooned in an inner stagnation of thinking and feeling. Alas, this is not a restful state to be in, for putrefaction inevitably involves fermentation.

Everything comes from humanity and humanity is always the same — changeable but incapable of perfection, vacillating but incapable of progress.

Living had got to be such a habit with him that he couldn't conceive of any other condition.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

I've always thought if it's not broke, why fix it?

You don't try to fix things that aren't broken.

I have never been able to understand the artist whose image never changes.

Throughout the western world, new systems have risen up whose job is to constantly record and monitor the present - and then compare that to the recorded past. The aim is to discover patterns, coincidences and correlations, and from that, find ways of stopping change. Keeping things the same.

Globalization is stirring widespread economic anxiety, and middle class incomes have stagnated while a class of super-rich has emerged.

In any bureaucracy, there's a natural tendency to let the system become an excuse for inaction.

When you are successful, there is this tendency to repeat the elements that we believe have worked in a certain film. Then it becomes formulaic, and there is no getting back.

If you think you're doing everything right, then you have a tendency to stand pat.

People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.

After all these years of saying the same thing about the Alvin Ailey company - terrific dancers, awful repertory - I'm finally accepting the inevitable: I'm not going to change my mind, and they're not going to change their ways. And why should they, given their juggernaut success all over the world?

The status quo is persistent and resistant. It exists because everyone wants it to. Everyone believes that what they've got is probably better than the risk and fear that come with change.

Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.

When you go off in the world and make your life, and you come back to your home town, and you find your old high-school friends driving in the same circles, doing the same things, that's what Hollywood's like. It's a little block, little town. It doesn't really grow or change.