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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• And last of all we have the secondary forms of crystals bursting in upon us, and sparkling in the rigidity of mathematical necessity and telling us, neither of harmony of design, usefulness or moral significance, nothing but spherical trigonometry and Napier's analogies. It is because we have blindly excluded the lessons of these angular bodies from the domain of human knowledge that we are still in doubt about the great doctrine that the only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Law, Design, Doubt

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

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• And the rigidity of the material with which we have to compose, is a more formidable opponent than Lasker or Capablanca. Because these lifeless opponents do not have any moments of human weakness!

  Henri Weenink

  Opponents, Chess, Weakness

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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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• The Amazons is a stupendous achievement--a long-anticipated centerpiece in the great puzzle of humankind. The story of these forbidden women, silenced for so long by the rigidity of traditional scholarship, is as exciting and surprising as a bestselling murder mystery; I simply couldn't put it down. Through scholarly brilliance and passion, Adrienne Mayor has opened the door to a forgotten world of gender equality, and her book ought to be required reading in every college history course.

  Anne Fortier

  Book, Reading, Passion

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• Reagan is held up to us as an example of never raising taxes. Correction: Reagan raised taxes six of his eight years as president. Why? He was a pragmatist, not doctrinaire. He saw problems emerging, and when his policies faltered he changed his views. Flexibility, not rigidity.

  Eugene Jarecki

  Eight, Views, Years

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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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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• [On Richard P. Feynman's live demonstration of the rigidity of the O-rings when cold that doomed the space shuttle Challenger, killing seven astronauts:] The public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks her a clear question.

  Freeman Dyson

  Eye, Thinking, Hands

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• Footballers today are forced to conform to a bodily aesthetic that in its rigidity and uniformity makes fashion models look as varied as snowflakes. This wasn't always so. Up until the 1980s most teams in all divisions had a couple of fat ones, a couple of little ones, at least one bandy one, one completely covered in hair, two weaklings and a chap with no neck. This was an era when you didn't need names on the backs of shirts in order to tell who's who, you could clearly identify them with your eyes half shut from the other side of the pitch.

  Danny Baker

  Soccer, Football, Fashion

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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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