Quotes About Stagnation

It was like a fingernail on a dead man's hand that kept growing when all other life had ceased.

Oh, we talk of progress, but what we really desire is the perpetuation of the present

Oh, we talk of progress, but what we really desire is the perpetuation of the present. With its seemingly endless excesses, its ravenous appetites. Ever the same rules, ever the same game.

What's so fun about doing the same thing again and again? You can only slap the handcuffs on a guy so many times.

Seabeck is slow to change.

You know what's been interesting about my career? It's been this slow rise with long plateaus.

We wanted to slow down. But one would let us.

Reform and exchange in English poetry are as slow as in the British constitution itself.

Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?

I have to say to the Government that you are not even getting nowhere fast - you are getting nowhere slowly.

There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.

When I say, 'doin' it, doin' it, doin' it' to a group of small business owners, they immediately respond. They recognize the experience of doing the same things over and over. Keeping the business afloat without ever getting ahead. And it's more than frustrating - it's heartbreaking.

This was in '79. I got pretty restless there, sitting around with a lot of people sitting around smoking cigarettes and talking about films, but nobody really doing anything.

Nothing happened, and time stubbornly refused to pass.

Stapledon gives us another possibility as he writes, "Some of these pre-utopian worlds, not malignant but incapable of further advance, were left in peace and preserved, as we preserve wild animals in national parks, for scientific interest.")

L'Homme a arrêté son évolution après avoir inventé la roue et l'air climatisé.

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.

Tlaloc realized how the human race had gone stagnant, how people had become so dependent on machines that they had nothing left but apathy. Their goals were gone, their drive, their passion. When they should have had nothing to do but unleash their creative impulses, they were too lazy to perform even the work of the imagination

Dude... Things never were the same. Change is... It's what we get. I guess that's my problem - I'm always trying to beat the clock; outrun the universe... Like nothing can change me, as long as I change first. I feel like I'm in this river, just getting swept along... And if I hold on to anyone, if I'm holding on for dear life, I'm not getting anywhere. I'm stuck... I never wanted to get stuck.

Grace was one of those types who never changed but only aged and had no apparent expectations or ambitions other than the wish that her life should remain the same.

When things don't change, their sameness becomes an accretion.

There were those who loved liberty, who cried out to live their own lives, to strive, to rise above, to achieve, and those bent on the mindless equality of stagnation brought about through the enforcement of an artificial, arbitrary, gray uniformity--those who wanted to transcend through their own effort, and those who wanted others to think for them and were willing to pay the ultimate price.

There's a door. Where does it go? It stays where it is, I think.

He wondered what kind of life it would be, having to keep swimming all the time to stay exactly in the same place. Pretty similar to his own, he decided.