Rigidity Quotes

• The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - 'indoctrination,' we might say - exercised through the mass media.

  Noam Chomsky

  Media, Democracy, United States

  Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault (2006). “The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature”, The New Press

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• Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.

  Laozi

  Inspiring, Spiritual, Strong

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• The 'good' mother, with her fixed smile, her rigidity, her goody-goody outlook, her obsession with unnecessary hygiene, is in fact a fool. It is the 'bad' mother, unafraid of a joke and a glass of wine, richly self-expressive, scornful of suburban values, who is, in reality, good.

  Rachel Cusk

  Mother, Wine, Reality

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• It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it.

  Mark Twain

  Wisdom, Mind, Trying

  Mark Twain (2010). “Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1: The Complete and Authoritative Edition”, p.177, Univ of California Press

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• Hair excited me. As the old ways - backcombing, rollers and rigidity - went out of the window, I started to feel the possibilities in front of my eyes.

  Vidal Sassoon

  Eye, Hair, Way

  "Vidal Sassoon Was an Actual Person" by Michael Schulman, www.newyorker.com. May 10, 2012.

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• In both life and work, stay flexible. Whether in a country, a company, or a family, the same holds true: Dictatorship and rigidity rarely work. Freedom and elasticity do.

  Robert Mondavi

  Country, Dictatorship, Company

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• Standardization leads to rigidity, and rigidity causes things to break.

  Bill James

  Causes, Break, Standardization

  "The Mind of Bill James: How a Complete Outsider Changed Baseball". Book by Scott Gray, 2006.

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• Remember that the six most expensive words in business are: 'We've always done it that way'

  Catherine DeVrye

  Change, Leadership, Business

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• Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotchpotch of impulses, our perpetual miracle - for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.

  Virginia Woolf

  Caring, Thinking, Essence

  Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie (1986). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925-1928”, Chatto & Windus

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• Thus, flexibility, as displayed by water, is a sign of life. Rigidity, its opposite, is an indicator of death.

  Anthony Lawlor

  Life, Opposites, Water

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• Every muscular rigidity contains the history and the meaning of its origin.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Wilhelm Reich (1961). “The function of the orgasm”

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• Man at his birth is supple and tender, but in death, he is rigid and hard. Thus, suppleness and tenderness accompany life, but rigidity and hardness accompany death.

  Laozi

  Men, Birth, Judo

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• The Christian churches and Christianity have nothing in common save in name: they are utterly hostile opposites. The churches are arrogance, violence, usurpation, rigidity, death; Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Christian, Humility, Opposites

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• 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

  Discipline, Mind, Overcoming

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• The difference between management and administration (which is what bureaucrats used to do exclusively) is the difference between choice and rigidity.

  Robert Heller

  Differences, Choices, Administration

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• The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

  Pope Paul VI

  Art, Lust, Crystals

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• The young mind is pliable and imitates, but in more advanced states grows rigid and must be warmed and softened before it will receive a deep impression.

  Joshua Reynolds

  Mind, Persuasion, States

  Sir Joshua Reynolds (1837). “Discourses on Painting and the Fine Arts, delivered at the Royal Academy. With a portrait”, p.95

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• The rigidity of those pledges is something I don’t like. The circumstances change and you can’t be wedded to some formula by Grover Norquist. It’s—who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway?

  George H. W. Bush

  Hell, Circumstances, Formulas

  "Preview: The Exclusive PARADE Interview with President and Mrs. Bush". Interview with Mark K. Updegrove, parade.com. July 13, 2012.

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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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• Whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition … we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of lose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science.

  Gregory Bateson

  Running, Pride, Thinking

  "Culture Contact and Schismogenesis". "MAN" Journal, Vol. 35, December, 1935.

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• They (i. e., the Pythagoreans) did not advocate the free confrontation of conflicting points of view. Instead, like all orthodox religions, they practised a rigidity that prevented them from correcting their errors.

  Carl Sagan

  Errors, Views, Point Of View

  "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage". Book by Carl Sagan, p. 184, 1980.

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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. We must not be weighed down by an insistence on a one size fits all approach which implies that all countries want the same level of integration. The fact is that they don't and we shouldn't assert that they do.

  David Cameron

  Country, Able, Facts

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• If (the West) shows its rigidity by making unjust decisions and putting their threats into practice, the Iranian people will not be the only ones to pay the price.

  Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

  Pay The Price, Practice, People

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• 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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