Inflexibility Quotes & Sayings

No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline. — Calvin Coolidge

Inflexibility is the worst human failing. You can learn to check impetuosity, overcome fear with confidence and laziness with discipline. But for rigidity of mind, there is no antidote. It carries the seeds of its own destruction. — Anton Myrer

Acting offers me an outlet. Here is the perfect opportunity to spend fleeting moments becoming an entirely different person; to experience a character entirely unlike myself, but to also make such a character a part of me. There is no routine here; there is no boredom. — Osric Chau

Now, in this town, you have to putter over a thing, even the slightest, a month. The powers that evolved the cabbage apple-pie in the morning, and executed it in the evening, are here unknown quantities. — Susan Hale

I think a lot of people have seen me on The Simple Life and think I'm a "spoilt airhead," but I was playing a character. The producers said they wanted Nicole and I just to be crazy and funny and say outlandish things. — Paris Hilton

In the future no human being is to find peace in the enjoyment of happiness if others beside him are unhappy. — Rudolf Steiner

Beautiful loser, where you gonna fall? When you realize, you just can't have it all. — Bob Seger

Mr Squeers himself acquired greater sternness and inflexibility from certain warm potations in which he was wont to indulge after his early dinner. — Charles Dickens

We're a society of brats, fighting over the same toys. That, for me, is the closest we come to be inherently evil as a people. It leads to selfishness, inflexibility, and impatience -- among so many other traits that are ugly and harmful. We're combative, competitive, petty, and suffer from one fatal flaw that I can never get my head around. We recognize behavior in others that makes us insane, while turning right around and doing the exact thing to someone else. — Trevor D. Richardson

The smallest attack option would hit the Soviet Union with almost two thousand weapons; the largest with more than three thousand. The vast scale and inflexibility of the SIOP led Kissinger to describe it as a horror strategy. — Eric Schlosser

As more people are added to any group, there is an inexorable drift toward inflexibility. — Ed Catmull

Representational painters: loosen the grip of inflexibility! Abstract painters: tighten your hold on crafting your images! In both types of painting students need to unlearn what one has acquired. — Joshua L. Goldberg

Obama invented himself against all odds and repeated parental abandonment, and he worked hard to regiment his emotions. But now that can come across as imperviousness and inflexibility. He wants to run the agenda; he doesn't want the agenda to run him. Once you become president, though, there's no way to predict what your crises will be. — Maureen Dowd

If it were true that conservatives were racist, sexist, homophobic, fascist, stupid, inflexible, angry, and self-righteous, shouldn't their arguments be easy to deconstruct? Someone who is making a point out of anger, ideology, inflexibility, or resentment would presumably construct a flimsy argument. So why can't the argument itself be dismembered rather than the speaker's personal style or hidden motives? Why the evasions? — Ann Coulter

Frequently we hold on so tightly to the good that we do know that we cannot receive the greater good that we do not know. — Richard J. Foster

Hey? We playin, or screwing the girls?" Kellan and I separated as we both looked over at Griffin grinning mischievously. Grabbing his pants, Griffin shook his head. "I'm cool either way. I just need to know which instrument to pull out."
Stephens, S.C. (2012-08-16). Effortless (Thoughtless Book 2) (p. 114). Gallery Books. Kindle Edition. — S.C. Stephens

It takes a bomb under his arse to make Hitler see logic. — Joseph Goebbels

man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: [152] they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when [153] the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. There — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Keep the process easy but effective by structuring your goal in this format: "I'm going to _. — Roosh V

Events and circumstances sometimes conspire against us; if we insist on inflexibility for the purpose of maintaining our beliefs, we end up compromising ourselves nevertheless. We salvage one set of principles only to forsake another. — Terry Brooks

Everyone with all those good intentions came to help Indonesia rebuild from the tsunami; but the co-ordination problem was very big, because they came with their own way of doing business; they came with the inflexibility of their own governance. — Sri Mulyani Indrawati

I am what I might term an unprejudiced sceptic. I am not given to either believing or disbelieving things 'on principle,' as I have found many idiots prone to be, and what is more, some of them not ashamed to boast of the insane fact. — William Hope Hodgson

Frederick consistently used his central position to concentrate against one fraction of the enemy, and he always employed tactics of indirect approach. Thereby he gained many victories. But his tactical indirect approach was geometrical rather than psychological-unprepared by the subtler forms of surprise favoured by Scipio-and for all their executive skill, these manoeuvres were narrow. The opponent might be unable to meet the following blow, owing to the inflexibility of his mind or his formations, but the blow itself did not fall unexpectedly. — B.H. Liddell Hart

You have to have faith that if you want people to like your brand, you have to do likeable things. There has to be some degree of trust that, if you're an enjoyable brand, people will want to spend time with you. — Jeff Chapman

Common sense was exactly what kingship, almost by definition, lacked: when the king's orders were executed no one dared to tell him honestly how they had turned out. With the absolute powers bestowed by kingship came an arrogance, a ruthlessness, an inflexibility, a habit of compulsion, an unwillingness to listen to reason, that no small community would have endured from any of its members-though the aggressive and humanly disagreeable qualities that make for such ambitious leadership might be found anywhere-as Margaret Mead discovered among the Mundugumor, whose leaders were known to the community as "really bad men," aggressive, gluttonous for power and prestige. — Lewis Mumford

He was one of those men who, even in the years of peace, would have advised his congregation that while God may well be honored by the inflexibility of the pious, he might also be honored by the flexibility of the sensible. — Thomas Keneally

Resistance is a simple concept: power, unjust and immoral, is confronted and dismantled. The powerful are denied their right to hurt the less powerful. Domination is replaced by equity in a shift or substitution of institutions. That shift eventually forms new human relationships, both personally and across society. — Lierre Keith

Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous expression with good humored inflexibility whether the whole cry of voices is on the other side. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every age has its own separatists. They are the intransigents, the undeviating purists who have to be right whatever the cost, who would sacrifice the world rather than compromise their own righteousness. — Edmund S. Morgan

Most Romans believed that their system of government was the finest political invention of the human mind. Change was inconceivable. Indeed, the constitution's various parts were so mutually interdependent that reform within the rules was next to impossible. As a result, radicals found that they had little choice other than to set themselves beyond and against the law. This inflexibility had disastrous consequences as it became increasingly clear that the Roman state was incapable of responding adequately to the challenges it faced. Political debate became polarized into bitter conflicts, with radical outsiders trying to press change on conservative insiders who, in the teeth of all the evidence, believed that all was for the best under the best of all possible constitutions (16). — Anthony Everitt

Russia's main weaknesses are inflexibility and dependence on energy resources — Christopher A. Pissarides

Walls in people's heads are sometimes more durable than walls made of concrete blocks. — Willy Brandt

Please God, please Knut Hamsun, don't desert me now. I started to write and I wrote:
The time has come, the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes - and ships - and sealing-wax
Of cabbages - and kings - — John Fante

I have always been suspicious of the phrase, the glow of pregnancy, and my suspicions were only confirmed by Lillian's appearance. Instead of a glow, her whole body seemed to become more and more dull, sallow and sickly sweet and vague, like a candle burning out or a line of smudged writing. — John Burnside

State solutions are imposed from above; they are often without corrective devices, and cannot easily be reversed on the proof of failure. Their inflexibility goes hand in hand with their planned and goal-directed nature, and when they fail the efforts of the state are directed not to changing them but to changing people's belief that they have failed. — Roger Scruton