Complacency Quotes - Page 8

• American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

  George Santayana

  Powerful, America, Optimism

  George Santayana (1921). “Character & Opinion in the United States: With Reminiscences of William James and Josiah Royce and Academic Life in America”

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• The drug war isn't what purports to be. If you look at the whole operation and the tie-in between the American intelligence agencies, these so-called "assets", the spies on the payroll of the CIA, and drug dealers. Don't let members of Congress and the media get away with this complacency and distortion!

  Jerry Brown

  War, Ties, Agency

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• It is through an "intimate cessation of all intellectual operations" that the mind is laid bare. If nor, discourse maintains it in its little complacency. ... The difference between inner experience and philosophy resides principally in this: that in experience, ... what counts is no longer the statement of wind, but the wind.

  Georges Bataille

  Philosophy, Wind, Differences

  Georges Bataille (1988). “Inner Experience”, p.13, SUNY Press

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• No author, I think, is deserving of much censure for vanity if, taking down one of his ten-year-old books, he exclaims: "Great heavens, did I write as well as that then?" for the implication always is that one does not write any longer so well and few are so envious as to censure the complacencies of an extinct volcano.

  Ford Madox Ford

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• In general, the nightmare quality of Marx's thought gives it, in this bedevilled age, an air of greater reality than the gentle complacency of the orthodox academics. Yet he, at the same time, is more encouraging than they, for he releases hope as well as terror from Pandora's box, while they preach only the gloomy doctrine that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

  Joan Robinson

  Reality, Air, Giving

  "An Essay on Marxian Economics". Book by Joan Robinson, Chapter I, Introduction, p. 4-5, 1966.

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• The ultimate solution to the problem of spiritual complacency is to create a systematically embedded culture of holy urgency.

  Alan Hirsch

  Spiritual, Culture, Problem

  Michael Frost, Alan Hirsch (2011). “The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage”, p.42, Baker Books

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• A son could bear with great complacency, the death of his father, while the loss of his inheritance might drive him to despair.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Father, Loss, Son

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 462-63, Del. Prin, Chapter XVII, 1922.

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• Linnæus, setting out for Lapland, surveys his "comb" and "spare shirt," "leathern breeches" and "gauze cap to keep off gnats," with as much complacency as Bonaparte a park of artillery for the Russian campaign. The quiet bravery of the man is admirable.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Science, Men, Gnats

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Excursions and Poems : The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Volume V (of 20)”, p.98, HOUGHTON MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

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• As one recalls some of the monstrous situations under which human beings have lived and live their lives, one marvels at man's meekness and complacency. It can only be explained by the quality of flesh to become calloused to situations that if faced suddenly would provoke blisters and revolt.

  George Amos Dorsey

  Men, Quality, Flesh

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• That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Kindness, Home, Giving

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• ...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

  Dream, Negativity, Bangs

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• Photography can be a deceitful, superficial medium that leads us into believing something even though we know it's not necessarily true. It lulls us into a false sense of complacency.

  Alison Jackson

  Photography, Believe, Deceitful

  "What I see in the mirror" by Alison Jackson, www.theguardian.com. November 10, 2007.

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• 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

  Encouragement, Thinking, Car

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• The enemy of stability can be complacency

  Ross Brawn

  Business, Enemy, Management

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• The young person isn't certain that love can be real; the middle-aged man is only discovering that it is; and the older person seems so sure of it. I was interested in the way that many of us go through the whole of our lives staying with someone just out of complacency, because leaving isn't easy.

  Conor McPherson

  Real, Men, Leaving

  "So there's these three Irishmen". Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. February 4, 2001.

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• 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

  Play, People, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

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• It is only in the depths of crisis and despair that the fear of losing one's personality breeds millennial hopes of rescue: otherwise, complacency prevails.

  Stanley Hoffmann

  Personality, Despair, Depth

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• Who does not sometimes envy the good and the brave, who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Courage, Envy, Brave

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1367, Delphi Classics

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• The hour when you say, "What does my happiness matter? It is poverty and filth, and a wretched complacency. Yet my happiness should justify existence itself!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Happiness, Matter, Poverty

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• To take the measure of oneself by reference to one's colleagues leads to envy or complacency rather than constructive self-examination.

  Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.

  Self, Envy, Examination

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• I think "post-racial" is a dangerous trap. You can fall into complacency and give your complicity a much more dangerous character.

  Allan Boesak

  Fall, Character, Thinking

  Source: reflections.yale.edu

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• Books keep the mind active. Without them, complacency is a huge danger.

  Carl Deuker

  Book, Mind, Danger

  Source: www.sjboysread.org

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• Too often we bask in our comfortable complacency and rationalize that the ravages of war, economic disaster, famine, and earth quake cannot happen here. Those who believe this are either not acquainted with the revelations of the Lord, or they do not believe them. Those who smugly think these calamities will not happen, that they will somehow be set aside because of the righteousness of the Saints, are deceived and will rue the day they harbored such a delusion.

  Ezra Taft Benson

  Religious, War, Believe

  Ezra Taft Benson (1988). “The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson”, Bookcraft Pubs

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• As Christian feel the changing winds of political climate, the blasts against their values in the media, the exclusion of the Christian faith from educational institutions, they begin to sense the dangers of complacency and of pietistical world flight.

  Edmund Clowney

  Christian, Religious, Educational

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• 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

  Self, Order, Support

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