Social Inertia Quotes

Often the less there is to justify a traditional custom the harder it is to get rid it.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein.

Culture is just a shambling zombie that repeats what it did in life; bits of it drop off, and it doesn't appear to notice.

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers glory - to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

Do what you will. Even if you tear yourself apart, most people will continue doing the same things.

Our feeling is that the status quo often gets a boost and this is the new status quo.

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary.

Inertia is as powerful a force in society and politics as it is on physics, and effecting change can be demanding and discouraging.

I think it's important that we run that tension between the way things are, in terms of the way we're governed, and the way we sort of become complacent.

Indifference is the dead weight of history.

Never underestimate the magnitude of the power of the forces that reinforce the status quo.

You always have groups that want to come after the big bad developer. They don't want to see anything done. Don't disturb a blade of grass; just freeze the world in time. It validates them.

Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.

Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and preference.

Technology advances at exponential rates, and human institutions and societies do not. They adapt at much slower rates. Those gaps get wider and wider.

I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.

I meant exactly what I said: that we are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science.

The status quo is a powerful force.

It's very, very hard to affect culture. And you can get surprised thinking you're farther down the path of change than you really are because, frankly, most of us like the way things are.

A hundred thousand men were led By one calf near three centuries dead; They followed still his crooked way And lost a hundred years a day; For thus such reverence is lent To well established precedent.

The functioning of our society is in a certain way sclerotic.

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.

What is called “apathy” is, I believe, a feeling of helplessness on the part of the ordinary citizen, a feeling of impotence in the face of enormous power. It’s not that people are apathetic; they do care about what is going on, but don’t know what to do about it, so they do nothing, and appear to be indifferent.