Quotes About Stagnation

I get bored with the same old film coming out every weekend. It feels like it's the same story all the time, and the same visuals, and the characters' dilemmas are remarkably similar.

We think that time is changing, but that may not be true. Everything else is changing and time is standing still and watching.

When you're frozen in time, nothing else really seems to matter.

The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other...they move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down...

There are too many years around this table, too much time confined in one place.

...as if the world had become a giant train station in which everything was delayed until further notice.

What a dull and unadventurous life this is sometimes.

It was as if life had been suspended and she had lost the power to bring it into motion again.

He had reacted to pain and loss in a remarkably immature manner—as usual. Nothing much ever changed in his life, except the incidentals.

Nothing is more painful to the human mind than after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.

Not inventing, and not adopting new ideas, can itself be both dangerous and immoral.

In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things.

Red Queen theories hold that the world is competitive to the death. It does keep changing. But did we not just hear that species are static for many generations and do not change? Yes. The point about the Red Queen is that she runs but stays in the same place. The world keeps coming back to where it started; there is change but not progress.

China, meanwhile, was heading the other way, into stagnation and poverty. China went from a state of economic and technological exuberance in around AD 1000 to one of dense population, agrarian backwardness and desperate poverty in 1950. According to Angus Maddison's estimates, it was the only region in the world with a lower GDP per capita in 1950 than in 1000. The blame for this lies squarely with China's governments.

Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born.

The houses stood like men in unpressed suits, who had lost the desire to stand straight:

Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence, working for less than their barest survival, leaving nothing but scraps for their rulers to loot, refusing to think, to venture, to produce, when the ultimate collector of their profits and the final authority on truth or error was the whim of some gilded degenerate sanctioned as superior to reason by divine right and by grace of a club.

It was a small, dim room and the air in it seemed heavy, as if it had not been disturbed for years.

I have no private purpose. I want power. I want my world of the future. Let all live for all. Let all sacrifice and none profit. Let all suffer and none enjoy. Let progress stop. Let all stagnate. There's equality in stagnation. All subjugated to the will of all. Universal slavery—without even the dignity of a master. Slavery to slavery. A great circle—and a total equality. The world of the future.

Greatness is very boring.

The traffic was moving about the speed of a government

The same meat, at the same time, from the same butcher. Who always says the same things, unless I say something different. I'll admit, buddy, that it's sometimes crossed my mind to walk up to him and say, 'How's it going there, Mr. Warren, you old bald bastard? Been fucking any warm chicken-holes lately?

The children of blame are cynicism and hopelessness. When we succumb to believing that we are victims of our circumstances and yield to the plight of determinism, we lose hope, we lose drive, and we settle into resignation and stagnation.

The only difference between a rut and a grave is a few feet.