Quotes & Sayings About Complacency

In contexts of colonial oppression, intellectuals, especially those who advocate and work for justice, cannot be just-or mere- intellectuals, in the abstract sense; they cannot but be immersed in some form or another of activism, to learn from fellow activists through real-life experiences, to widen the horizons of their sources of inspiration, and to organically engage in effective, collective emancipatory processes, without the self-indulgence, complacency, or ivory-towerness that might otherwise blur their moral vision. In short, to be just intellectuals, committed to justice as the most ethical and durable foundation of peace. — Omar Barghouti

Self esteem is not the same as being self centered, self absorbed or selfish. Self esteem is also not complacency or overconfidence, both of which and set us up for failure. Self esteem is a strong motivator to work hard. Self esteem is related to mental health and happiness. — Glenn R. Schiraldi

Once the soul looked contemptuously upon the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing: - the soul wished the body lean, monstrous, and famished. Thus it thought to escape from the body and the earth. But that soul was itself lean, monstrous, and famished; and cruelty was the delight of this soul! So my brothers, tell me: What does your body say about your soul? Is not your soul poverty and filth and miserable self-complacency? — Friedrich Nietzsche

We've all of us got to make up our minds to the sacrifice of some thing. I mean something more than just the ordinary sacrifices in life, not so much for the sake of the next generation as for the sake of some principle, for the sake of some immaterial quality like pride or intense self-respect or even a saving complacency; a spiritual tonic which the race needs perhaps just as much as the body might need iron or whatever it does need to give the proper kind of resistance. There are some things which an individual might want, but which he'd just have to give up forever for the sake of the more important whole. — Jessie Redmon Fauset

I once took pleasure some place in seeing men, through piety, take a vow of ignorance, as of chastity, poverty, penitence. It is also castrating our disorderly appetites, to blunt that cupidity that pricks us on to the study of books, and to deprive the soul of that voluptuous complacency which tickles us with the notion of being learned. — Michel De Montaigne

When the armed robber of unhappiness knocks over the Keebler cookie display of our complacency, and bangs the samurai sword of negativity on the checkout counter of our dreams, we must not be afraid to hurl the fruit cocktail can of hope. — Dave Barry

There is nothing spiritual about complacency. — Marianne Williamson

I couldn't but surmise that the devil, looking at the cruel wars that Christianity has occasioned, the persecutions, the tortures Christian has inflicted on Christian, the unkindness, the hypocracy, the intolerance, must consider the balance sheet with complacency. And when he remembers that it has laid upon mankind the bitter burden of the sense of sin that has darkened the beauty of the starry night and cast a baleful shadow on the passing plesures of a world to be enjoyed, he must chuckle as he murmurs: give the devil his due. — W. Somerset Maugham

Avoid the tyranny of the reasonable voice ... it will guarantee a complacency of never trying anything adventurous ... — J. Michael Straczynski

Ministry of Disturbance, a regulated source of annoyance; a destroyer of routine; an underminer of complacency. — C.D. Darlington

Business leaders must not cling to old ways of doing business, or allow inertia or complacency to prevent them from making the decisions that they will eventually be forced to make. — Patricia Hewitt

All through their relationship, Harry was the one in charge, Harry was the one who gave them direction. This wasn't because Harry was smarter or even better at it than Craig was; it just meant more to him, to be in control. And Craig didn't really care, so he ceded it away. He liked not being responsible all the time.
Complacency. Craig realizes now that this was complacency. One of the reasons he liked the sound of Harry's voice was because it meant he didn't have to use his own. But eventually this strategy backfired. Eventually Harry realized what was happening, and didn't feel right about it. He wanted Craig to fight a little more, but by the time Craig started fighting for them to stay together, he had already lost. — David Levithan

How did it ever come to this?" I asked him. "The same way it always has and - to our great misfortune - probably always will. With fierce hate harbored by a few and complacency displayed by the rest. All it takes for evil to take hold and flourish is for men and women of conscience to do nothing. — Lisa Shearin

I complacently accepted the social order in which I was brought up. I probably would have continued in my complacency if the happynecessity of self-support had not fallen to my lot; if self-support had not deepened and widened my contacts and my experience. — Mary Barnett Gilson

Men set themselves a goal, and having attained it, are satisfied and grow paunches. In their complacency they forget that their only future is now death. — Edgard Varese

And America has done much good. And there's no shortage of nations far exceeding any of its faults or sins. But no nation in the modern world has ever been given so much. None has been so blessed. To whom much is given, much is required. If a nation so blessed by God should turn away from Him, what then? It's blessing will be replaced with curses? Yes. And has America turned away from God? I asked. It has turned and is turning. How? In the same way Israel turned. It started with a spiritual complacency, then spiritual confusion, then the merging of God with idols and then, ultimately, the rejection of his ways. Just as with ancient Israel, America began ruling God out of its life, turning, step by step, against His ways, at first subtly and then more and more brazenly. — Jonathan Cahn

I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago's South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder
alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware
is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all. — Barack Obama

Complacency will be the architecture of your downfall. — Jeremy Gutsche

I hate complacency. I play every gig as if it could be my last, then I enjoy it more than ever. — Nigel Kennedy

I'm at the tipping point of a transformation that began months ago, an intentional decision put in motion. And it feels so fucking good. I've come to the full realization that my happiness, my life, falls squarely on my shoulders. No one's gonna do it for it me. I'm the one who makes it or breaks it. It's a choice. A choice that demands action in exchange for reward. Idleness and complacency lead to mediocrity. Sometimes action is really fucking hard fought, but that's when the payoff's the highest. That's when great things happen. Not good things ... but epic things. And I've fallen in love with epic. It's the only way to live. — Kim Holden

The complacency of the individual who admires his own excellence is bad enough, but it is more respectable than the complacency of the man who has no self-esteem because he has not even a superficial self which he can esteem. He is not a person, not an individual, only an atom. This atomized existence is sometimes praised as humility or as self-sacrifice, some-times it is called obedience, sometimes it is devotion to the dialectic of class war. It produces a kind of peace which is not peace, but only the escape from an immediately urgent sense of conflict. It is the peace not of love but of anesthesia. It is the peace not of self-realization and self-dedication, but of flight into irresponsibility. — Thomas Merton

It is our duty to give meaning to the life of future generations by sharing our knowledge and experience; by teaching an appreciation of work well done and a respect for nature, the source of all life; by encouraging the young to venture off the beaten path and avoid complacency by challenging their emotions. — Paul Bocuse

I'm speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They're gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that's wrong. And it's not the kind of company that Apple wants to be. — Tim Cook

If complacency is bad for business, it can also be bad for the human spirit — Simon Silva

Like an unexpected wet mop in the face of tired complacency, The Sovereignty Solution works on the receptive mind as a pry bar works on a tightly sealed box. Written with courage and passion, this is a book whose often counterintuitive clarity shakes entombed assumptions like an earthquake. Whether you end up convinced or not, you will never think about American national security the same way ever again. — Adam Garfinkle

By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed, that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or another, real or imaginary. — Jane Austen

History shows that all protest movements rely on symbols - boycotts, strikes, sit-ins, flags, songs. Symbolic action on whatever scale - from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to wearing a simple wristband - is designed to disrupt our everyday complacency and force people to think. — Hugh Evans

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man. — Pat Conroy

When you get a principle on which everyone is agreed, you get the beginning of complacency and deterioration. — Idries Shah

The hole in the ozone layer is a kind of skywriting. At first it seemed to spell out our continuing complacency before a witch's brew of deadly perils. But perhaps it really tells of a newfound talent to work together to protect the global environment. — Carl Sagan

I believe the root of all happiness on this earth to lie in the realization of a spiritual life with a consciousness of something wider than materialism; in the capacity to live in a world that makes you unselfish because you are not overanxious about your own comic fallibilities; that gives you tranquility without complacency because you believe in something so much larger than yourself. — Hugh Walpole

He told me that I hadn't done anything yet. Hadn't lived yet. All you do is pass the time, he said. — Don DeLillo

One thing is certain: the arts keep you alive. They stimulate, encourage, challenge, and, most of all, guarantee a future free from boredom. They allow growth and even demand it in that time of life we call maturity but too often enter it with a childish faith that what we learned in youth is sustenance enough for the years when most men are mentally famished but won't admit it - or when they are apt to curb their hunger with the sops of complacency, security, and the assurance of death. — Vincent Price

Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things — Gilles Deleuze

Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long. — Ron Paul

The Spirit wants to make you threatening to all the forces of injustice and apathy and complacency that keep our world from flourishing. — John Ortberg

Uncertainty is everywhere. But I am living in the midst of the uncertainty and risk, amid things that can and do bring physical destruction, because I am running from things that can destroy my soul, complacency, comfort and ignorance. I am much more terrified of living a comfortable life in a self serving society and failing to follow Jesus than I am of any illness or tragedy. — Katie J. Davis

We judge of others for the most part by their good opinion of themselves; yet nothing gives such offense or creates so many enemies, as that extreme self-complacency or superciliousness of manner, which appears to set the opinion of every one else at defiance. — William Hazlitt

The fact that we have not had a terrorist attack in this country in the last six years is not a cause for complacency or a time to celebrate the end of the struggle. The threat is not going away. The enemy has not lost interest ... Fundamentally, we're in a struggle about ideology. Terrorists want to remake the world in their own image and it is the image that is intolerant of the kinds of institutions that we cherish. — Michael Chertoff

Complacency with our traditional judgement based thinking methods is not enough. Our existing thinking habits are excellent just as the rear wheel of a motor car is excellent but not enough. We need to put far more emphasis on creative and design thinking. Judgement and analysis are not enough. — Edward De Bono

Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage.
Naomi Littlebear — Cherrie L. Moraga

Pride looks back upon its past deeds, and calculating with nicety what it has done, it commits itself to rest; whereas humility looks to that which is before, and discovering how much ground remains to be trodden, it is active and vigilant. Having gained one height, pride looks down with complacency on that which is beneath it; humility looks up to a higher and yet higher elevation. The one keeps us on this earth, which is congenial to its nature; the other directs our eye, and tends to lift us up to heaven. — James McCosh

The very fact that the planet is probably unsustainable with all that we've done to it and are doing to it, it's an appalling piece of evidence. It shows our complacency, our lack of passion or inclination to be authentic and really understand our true values. It's consistently depressing, but nevertheless, we carry on. — Annie Lennox

Experiments in the visual arts (the invention of new ways of seeing things), are made because, due to the way the apparatus that makes up the mind is made, old processes and patterns have continually to be broken up in order to make it possible to perceive the new aspects and arrangements of evolving consciousness. The great enemy of intelligence is complacency. — John Dos Passos

There is such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I really try to put myself in uncomfortable situations. Complacency is my enemy. — Trent Reznor

I felt not jealousy so much as shame for not understanding the bond between them. The bond that was stalwart in the face of complacency and cruelty and wandering desire. The habit of each other that was the bedrock upon which they'd sunk the foundation of their mutual existence - and upon which they were standing, still. I — Jan Ellison

Complacency and ignorance," Zebara suggested, pouring more brandy. "A very good way to keep a large population so tractable the society lacks rebellion." "But — Anne McCaffrey

Companies selling a product play down its vulnerability and emphasize its robustness. But only after technology leaves the dock is it really tested. For human operators in control of a supposedly infallible system, complacency and overconfidence can take over, and caution may be thrown to the wind. — Henry Petroski

In setting down these recollections of my early years so far removed from their unfolding, I am fooled, as all are, by time itself. My parents, long gone from my world, live again. Memory, which so confounds our waking life with anticipation and regret, may well be our one true earthly consolation when time slips out of joint." Chapter 6, The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue

"Assembled in a small circle, our faces glowed in the flickering light of the campfire, signs of anxious weariness in our tired eyes, but the meal would prove revitalizing. As the fire burnt down and our bellies filled, a calm complacency settled upon us, like a blanket drawn around our shoulders by absent mothers." Chapter 20, The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue — Keith Donohue

It's the age-old tale of complacency, Shea." The tall warrior sighed deeply and stretched as he rose. "We may be standing on the brink of the greatest war in a thousand years, but no one wants to accept the fact. Everyone gets in the same rut - let a few take care of the gates to the city while the rest forget and go back to their homes. It becomes a habit - depending on a few to protect the rest. And then one day ... the few are not enough, and the enemy is within the city - right through the open gates ... — Terry Brooks

Complacency doesn't make sense for a guy trying to redefine normal. — John Fairclough

Are we willing to tolerate ignorance and complacency in matters that affect the entire human family? — Carl Sagan

I think, like a lot of actors and people in the arts who are struggling to get where they want to be, you spend a lot of time sitting around grumbling about how you're not doing the kind of work you really want to do. But there's a lot of complacency in that, too. — Mary Elizabeth Winstead

The best kind of rain, of course, is a cozy rain. This is the kind the anonymous medieval poet makes me remember, the rain that falls on a day when you'd just as soon stay in bed a little longer, write letters or read a good book by the fire, take early tea with hot scones and jam and look out the streaked window with complacency. — Susan Allen Toth

One of the greatest foes of the Christian is religious complacency.. Orthodox Christianity has fallen to its present low estate from lack of spiritual desire. Among the many who profess the Christian faith, scarcely one in a thousand reveals any passionate thirst for God. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

George Orr stayed in Portland because he had always lived there and because he had no reason to believe that life anywhere else would be better, or different. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Don't let your special character and values, the secret that you know and no one else does, the truth - don't let that get swallowed up by the great chewing complacency. — Aesop

I do not believe that I am a vindictive man, but when the immortal gods take a hand in the matter it is pardonable to observe the results with complacency. — W. Somerset Maugham

But he also knew that, as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room with the night coming down and a book close by and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would ne be disturbed. The gap between these two desires filled him with sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of having a single consciousness, knowing merely its own bare feelings and experiencing singly and alone it own pain or fear or pleasure or complacency. — Colm Toibin

Your courage draws people out of complacency into their destiny. — Bill Johnson

Complacency kills. Paranoia is the reason I'm still alive. — D.J. Molles

You see, each country has a colour, a smell, and also a contagious sickness. In my country the sickness is complacency. In France it's arrogance, and in the United States it's ignorance."

"What about Rwanda?"

"Easy power and impunity. Here, there's total disorder. To someone who has a little money or powere, everything that seems forbidden elsewhere looks permissible and possible. All it takes is to dare it. Someone who's simply a liar in my country can be a fraud artist here, and the fraud artist gets to be a big-time thief. Chaos and most of all poverty give him powers he wouldn't have elsewhere. — Gil Courtemanche

Queers can't destroy science fiction. No one can. No one can destroy the future. But we can, through malice or complacency or inattention, limit the future. — Sigrid Ellis

This is the complacency I have run into. — Bob Higgins

As has happened so often in history, victory had bred a complacency and fostered an orthodoxy which led to defeat in the next war. — B.H. Liddell Hart

It is by worrying about adversity that people survive; complacency brings catastrophe. — Amitav Ghosh

Elizabeth understood as she never had before. Everyone, all of them had lived secure in the belief that the earth was stable, unchanging, eternal.
Now no one could trust the ground beneath their feet.
Yes, the earthquake was the story of destruction, but not just of things. An earthquake destroyed security. It destroyed complacency. It changed the people who lived through it. — Christina Dodd

Lord, we know that you will come again in glory to raise the living and the dead. Resurrect us now from the death of comfort, complacency, sloth, and shallowness that we might witness to your love in life and death. Amen. — Shane Claiborne

I'm a strong supporter of comfort breeds complacency. Growing up poor I wasn't comfortable, my mom had to work so hard and I woke up one day and decided I was not going to come home until I could help her pay the bills. — Farrah Gray

Our teachers were firm believers in the corporal punishment that Americans had given up, which was probably one reason they could no longer win wars. For us, violence began at home and continued in school, parents and teachers beating children and students like Persian rugs to shake the dust of complacency and stupidity out of them, and in that way make them more beautiful. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Sometimes, I have a dared dream to myself that one day, history may even say that my voice--which disturbed the white man's smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency--that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even a fatal catastrophe. — Malcolm X

There is no place for arrogance or complacency in racing because you are up there one minute and on your backside the next. — Tony McCoy

Why do these civilizations all seem to follow the same identifiable sequence - from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, and finally from dependence back into bondage? — Andy Andrews

The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities. — Benjamin E. Mays

But there is nothing that makes its way more directly to the Soul than Beauty, which immediately diffuses a secret satisfaction and complacency through the imagination, and gives a finishing to any thing that is Great or Uncommon. — Joseph Addison

People want to feel good, be entertained, eat salty shit, and cum twice a week, and provided they do they'll stay quiet. — Rick Remender

To be honest, we live in an exciting time where form is concerned. My sincerest hope is that more people will notice this and agree to play and invent - the only way to not succumb to the complacency and market-driven schlock of the present tense is to continually interrogate it from the inside out. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I think that one of the biggest flaws of
mankind is that we become complacent with our lives. — Daniel Willey

If you're playing a good guy, you show some darkness. If you're playing a dark guy, you show something different, like humor, that will mix it up and hopefully surpass the audience's expectations. What I'm battling all the time is complacency in the audience. I try to bring a little mystery to what might happen because that engages people more. — Campbell Scott

Then humming thrice, he assumed a most ridiculous solemnity of aspect, and entered into a learned investigation of the nature of stink...The French were pleased with the putrid effluvia of animal food; and so were the Hottentots in Africa, and the Savages in Greenland; and that the Negroes on the coast of Senegal would not touch fish till it was rotten; strong presumptions in favour of what is generally called stink, as those nations are in a state of nature, undebauched by luxury, unseduced by whim and caprice: that he had reason to believe the stercoraceous flavour, condemned by prejudice as a stink, was, in fact, most agreeable to the organs of smelling; for, that every person who pretended to nauseate the smell of another's excretions, snuffed up his own with particular complacency... — Tobias Smollett

It was an age of lavishness. Of enormous meals, enormous families, enormous spreading skirts and an enormous, spreading Empire. An age of gross living, grinding poverty, inconceivable prudery, insufferable complacency and incomparable enterprise. — M.M. Kaye

Man may reproach women for their dissimulation, but his complacency must be great indeed for him to be so constantly duped. — Simone De Beauvoir

Success has no idle hands; affords no legs at rest. — Johnnie Dent Jr.

To a winner, complacency and overconfidence can be destructive. To losers, desperation and despondency are just as harmful. — Bill Walsh

Success Should Never Breed Complacency — Xenophon

If we get used to life that is the crime ... — Jean Garrigue

When the fear of failure triumphs over the repugnance of mediocrity, we must resign ourselves to the status quo. Every change, every opportunity to do something different will send us running to hide beneath a cover of excuses and complacency. Those few courageous souls who delve into the lands where they risk failure, will be soundly ridiculed. They will be condemned not because they dream, but rather for making their dreams real and destroying the illusion that all that can be thought has been thought, all that can be done has been done, and all that can be felt has been felt. In their enthusiastic insolence, they see life filled with infinite possibilities and they know they must chart their own course, even if they must go alone. — D.A. Blankinship

Sometimes mistakes are the best thing that can happen, because they might lift you ... out of your complacency, and open your mind up to a whole other area that you wouldn't have gone to intentionally. — Bobby McFerrin

If he had but a little more brains, she thought to herself, I might make something of him; but she never let him perceive the opinion she had of him; listened with indefatigable complacency to his stories of the stable and the mess; laughed at all his jokes...When he came home, she was alert and happy; when he went out she pressed him to go; when he stayed at home, she played and sang for him, made him good drinks, superintended his dinner, warmed his slippers, and steeped his soul in comfort. The best of women {I have heard my grandmother say) are hypocrites. We don't know how much they hide from us: how watchful they are when they seem most artless and confidential: how often those frank smile which they wear so easily are traps to cajole or elude or disarm--I don't mean in your mere coquettes, but your domestic models and paragons of female virute. — William Makepeace Thackeray

You need to have a redesign because familiarity breeds a kind of complacency. — Timothy White

Self-complacency is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as cause. — Baruch Spinoza

Then, just at the peak of complacency, when it was assumed that the climate of the world had changed forever, when the conductor of the philharmonic played Vivaldi's Four Seasons and left out an entire movement, and when to children of a young age stories of winter were told as if they were fairy tales, New York was hit by a cataclysmic freeze, and, once again, people huddled together to talk fearfully of the millennium. — Mark Helprin

So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. — Jon Krakauer

I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate. The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain. — A.W. Tozer

The stealth jihadists employ this kind of obfuscation to great effect. Their immediate goal is not to overpower America directly through combat, but rather to convince Americans that there is nothing at all to fear from Islamic theology, and that anyone who argues otherwise is an Islamophobe motivated solely by hate. With the population lulled into complacency, they can go about their work of forcing Western "accommodation" to Islamic practices. This is meant to set the stage for Islam eventually to emerge supreme. — Robert Spencer

A step towards complacency is a step towards mediocrity;
a step towards diligence is a step towards brilliance. — Matshona Dhliwayo

We fight every step of the godsdamned way, every godsdamned moment, for every godsdamned inch. We never give up. We never given in. Complacency is the devil if there was a devil. Which there is not. There's — Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

In recent years, we've become enamored with our own past success. Lulled into complacency by the glitter of our own achievements. We've become accustomed to the title of Military Superpower, forgetting the qualities that got us there. We've become accustomed to our economic dominance in the world, forgetting that it wasn't reckless deals and get rich quick schemes that got us where we are, but hard work and smart ideas, quality products and wise investments. — Barack Obama

It is true that, in poetizing love, we assume in those we love qualities that are lacking in them, and that is a source of continual mistakes and continual miseries for us. But to my thinking it is better, even so; that is, it is better to suffer than to find complacency on the basis of woman being woman and man being man. — Anton Chekhov