Cultural Inertia Quotes

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

England is a slow moving country, reluctant to change—deeply reluctant to change.

The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity — a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.

Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

Civilization is paralysis.

It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

Today evolution of human intelligence has advanced us to the stage where most of us are too smart to invent new gods but are reluctant to give up the old ones.

Some rules are nothing but old habits that people are afraid to change.

No system disappears quickly because habits live on.

The culture of Saudi Arabia belongs to a past age. It is not appropriate for the age of globalization.

Efforts to reform are often met with resistance because the system always tries to fall back to the status quo and what is comfortable.

China is completely lacking in self-awareness and as someone who has stepped outside that society, I have a responsibility to write about it as I see it.

The penalty for a long life is increasing resistance to change.

Some of the strongest resistance to necessary change is the result of what Jim O'Toole has so aptly characterized as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."

The persistence of erroneous beliefs exacerbates the widespread anachronistic failure to recognize the urgent problems that face humanity on this planet.

a time has come in our history when what is known has little connection with what is done.

People who want to wage cultural wars ought to keep in mind that cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.

Once you have something so deeply infused in your culture and your brand, it would be very difficult to reverse that inertia if you wanted to.

Custom is a prison, locked and barred by those who long ago were dust, the keys of which are in the keeping of the dead.

We ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is' that there is no viable alternative to the present.

Society in general maintains such a vested interested in its cozy habits and solidified belief systems that it had rather die - or kill - than entertain change. Consider how threatened religious fundamentalists of all faiths remain to this day by science in general and Darwin in particular.

Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original (perhaps unrealistic) expectations. More often than not, resistance is cultural in nature, the result of what James O'Toole so aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."

Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive anything as true, or seek its own interest, in any manner but as its forefathers have opined and acted.

We impose the form of the old on the content of the new.