Quotes About Rigidity

Isn't fixity the hallmark of the living dead?

no matter how valid, how vital, one's belief system might be, one undermines that system and ultimately negates it when one gets rigid and dogmatic in one's adherence to it.

It never occurred to us that the Earth itself might have been unyielding

Having been burnt in Iraq and Afghanistan, the logical response of America, if it were supple, flexible, and rational, would be to walk away from getting involved in unnecessary conflicts in the Islamic world. The inability to make this U-turn demonstrates that, like the old Soviet Union, America has become rigid, inflexible, and doctrinaire.

At the right temperatures, geologic faults allow for movement, ductility, flow. Earthquakes happen when weaknesses cannot be expressed. "And communities which are rigid, which do not take into account the weak points of the community—people who are in difficulty—tend to be communities that do not evolve. When they do evolve, it's generally by a very strong commotion, a revolution.

colossal rigidity, whether in dinosaurs or dictatorships, has a very poor record of evolutionary survival.

a scientific endeavor can never transcend itself to select new goals. Only subjective human persons can do that. Thus if we chose as our goal the state of happiness for human beings (a goal deservedly ridiculed by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World), and if we involved all of society in a successful scientific program by which people became happy, we would be locked in a colossal rigidity in which no one would be free to question this goal,

Laws should be made of iron, not pudding.

Obstinacy and vehemency in opinion are the surest proofs of stupidity.

Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.

The Unconvincibles are the people who are not amenable to reason of any sort. Their minds are not only closed, but bolted and hermetically sealed. In most cases , their beliefs congealed at an early age; by the time they left their teens, they were encased in a rigid framework of thought and feeling, which no evidence or argument can penetrate.

Faith that is allergic to questioning is just fundamentalist blind dogma.

Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.

A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.

There were guys who were uptight and set in their ways, like Cliff, who couldn't even handle having a nickname like everybody else. They tended to gather as much knowledge as they could but had trouble making even the smallest behavioral change.

the first symptoms of decline. "The collapse of nations," he argued, was due to "internal rigidity coupled with a decline in the ability, both moral and physical, to shape surrounding circumstances. . . . What would have been Western history if the knights who defeated the Arabs at Tours had surrendered because they believed in the historic inevitability of the triumph of Christianity? Central Europe would today be Moslem."134

The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.

the strenuous and dogmatic is the moral enemy of the good.

Too much protocol.

When the rich go over-board, politically speaking, they go all the way and with all their clothes on. They have been used to having what they want, and patience is apt to be the least of their virtues. Bessie Budd had joined the Communist Party, and she followed the Party line, keeping her eyes fixed upon it so closely that she couldn't even see how it wobbled, and would be greatly irritated if you called her attention to the chart.

It must be noted that it is often the colleague or direct disciple of a new thinker who gets stuck in literal interpretations of the work, tending to freeze the new ideas and language into an inflexible, static condition.

That life was full of rules. Too many rules; it was a prepacked kind of life.

She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of wood.

In small towns, the social dynamic was like concrete; it set early and hard.