Rigidity Quotes - Page 2

• I am a woman, and even if I could proceed with harshness and rigidity, it would disgust me nonetheless.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Women, Disgusting, If I Could

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• Our schools offer no conception of the scientific process of discovery. They do not encourage creative thought, in fact, they stifle it through too much rigidity in teaching. If we set out to give as little help as possible to originality in science, we could hardly devise a better plan than our education system. Youngsters ought to be told what is unknown about ourselves and our universe as well as what is known.

  William Lipscomb

  Teaching, School, Ignorance

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• The rigidity of a bottle's form does not affect the fluidity of the liquid it contains.

  Leon Krier

  Doe, Bottles, Fluidity

  Leon Krier (2009). “The Architecture of Community”, p.70, Island Press

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• If education does not create a need for the best in life, then we are stuck in an undemocratic, rigid caste society.

  Sargent Shriver

  Education, Caste System, Doe

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• It is a grave injustice to a child or adult to insist that they stop crying. One can comfort a person who is crying which enables him to relax and makes further crying unnecessary; but to humiliate a crying child is to increase his pain, and augment his rigidity. We stop other people from crying because we cannot stand the sounds and movements of their bodies. It threatens our own rigidity. It induces similar feelings in ourselves which we dare not express and it evokes a resonance in our own bodies which we resist.

  Alexander Lowen

  Children, Pain, People

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• Only imagination that towers can reproduce evanescence and render rigidity flexible.

  Marianne Moore

  Imagination, Towers, Evanescence

  Marianne Moore, Patricia C. Willis (1986). “The complete prose of Marianne Moore”, Viking Pr

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• A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then. He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the strong man . . . A man who cannot hold his peace, till the time come for speaking and acting, is no right man.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Strength, Strong, Mistake

  Thomas Carlyle (1993). “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History”, p.158, Univ of California Press

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• Physically it's kind of lassitude, the apathy and tiredness that precedes the flu or some other illness, or death. My legs ache and feel heavy, my skin has become more sensitive to cold and to heat, to the hardness or rigidity of things. Nothing interests me, I feel uncomfortable being still but would feel even more uncomfortable if I moved. I don't know whether speaking is painful or just boring. I sit here, staring straight ahead, with no desires, no needs, hollow. I'm not even sad. I feel only passivity and indifference.

  Antonio Lobo Antunes

  Desire, Skins, Apathy

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• We live in an era when rapid change breeds fear, and fear too often congeals us into a rigidity which we mistake for stability.

  Lynn Townsend White, Jr.

  Motivational, Change, Mistake

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• Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Growing Up, Our World, Expansion

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• Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Mother, Men, Moon

  "Lavinia". Book by Ursula K. Le Guin, 2008.

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• The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Law, Mind, Matter

  James Clerk Maxwell (1990). “The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell: 1846-1862”, p.383, CUP Archive

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• The EU must be able to act with the speed and flexibility of a network, not the cumbersome rigidity of a bloc.

  David Cameron

  Able, Speed, Flexibility

  "The speech that was the start of the end of David Cameron". David Cameron's Speech at Bloomberg, 2013, www.independent.co.uk. June 24, 2016.

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• The cry for freedom is a sign of suppression. It will not cease to ring as long as man feels himself captive. As diverse as the cries for freedom may be, basically they all express one and the same thing: The intolerability of the rigidity of the organism and of the machine-like institutions which create a sharp conflict with the natural feelings for life. Not until there is a social order in which all cries for freedom subside will man have overcome his biological and social crippling, will he have attained genuine freedom.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Freedom, Men, Order

  "The Mass Psychology of Fascism". Book by Wilhelm Reich, 1933.

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• Since lawyers are thinkers and not feelers, and their moral development is locked into the rigidity of maintaining law and order, they often come across as impersonal, insensitive, amoral, and not particularly human to the clients they serve.

  Thane Rosenbaum

  Law, Moral Development, Order

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• Two hundred years ago the first liberal economist, Adam Smith, warned businessmen that they could absorb only a certain amount of rigidity. In the easy days after World War II... wage rises could be financed out of inflationary price increases.

  John Chamberlain

  Wisdom, War, Years

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• Golf gives no margin: either you win or you fail. You cannot hedge; you cannot bluff; you cannot give a stop order. One chance is given you, and you hit or miss. There is nothing more rigid in life. And it is this ultra and extreme rigidity that makes golf so intensely interesting.

  Arnold Haultain

  Golf, Winning, Order

  Arnold Haultain (1912). “The Mystery of Golf”

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• Be aware that rigidity imprisons.

  Madeleine L'Engle

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• I see Professionalism as a spreading disease of the present-day world, a sort of poly-oligarchy by which various groups (subway conductors, social workers, bricklayers) can bring things to a halt if their particular demands are not met. (Meanwhile, the irrelevance of each profession increases, in proportion to its increasing rigidity.) Such lucky groups demand more in each go-round - but meantime, the number who are permanently unemployed grows and grows.

  Ted Nelson

  Numbers, Irrelevance, World

  "Computer Lib/Dream Machines". Book by Ted Nelson, 1974.

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• Innovation is very important to me, especially professionally. The alternative, standing pat, leads to complacency, rigidity and eventually failure.

  Georges St-Pierre

  Mma, Innovation, Important

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• The abstraction, ostensibly, is simply for me the penetration of something that is more profound in many ways than rigidity of a form. A form if it breathes some, if it has some enigma to it, it is also the enigma that is the abstract, I would think.

  Beauford Delaney

  Thinking, Profound, Way

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• They have eliminated rigidity, both physical and psychological, in order to support more fluid processes whereby temporary teams are created to deal with specific and ever-changing needs. They have simplified roles into minimal categories; they have knocked down walls and created workplaces where people, ideas, and information circulate freely.

  Margaret J. Wheatley

  Leadership, Wall, Work

  Margaret J. Wheatley (2010). “Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World”, p.88, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• We embark unhesitatingly on the path, in a direction that is absolutely right and urgent, supported by everyone, in the knowledge that this path is but a learning process... We have to keep on learning, creating, applying, by-passing, touching upon, refining and clarifying a number of notions and details that need to be improvised and applied and which, thank God, we cannot foresee. The only rigidity lies in our will, our conviction that we are on the right road and that our initiatives are most pressing.

  Yehudi Menuhin

  Life, Lying, Creating

  "The Mandate". Book by Jacob Bergen, p. 33, 2006.

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• The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Fighting, Effort, Computer

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• The adult who puts his arm around his companion in the ballroom, and the child in the roadway, skipping in a round dance - they forget themselve, they dissolve the weight of earthly contact and the rigidity of daily existence. The soul slips into a twilight stage.

  Curt Sachs

  Dance, Children, Twilight

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