Inflexible Quotes

At this point in history when all things which concern man and the structure and elements of history itself are suddenly revealed to us in a new light, it behooves us in our scientific thinking to become masters of the situation, for it is not inconceivable that sooner than we suspect, as has often been the case before in history, this vision may disappear, the opportunity may be lost, and the world will once again present a static, uniform, and inflexible countenance. ~ Karl Mannheim

I believe in a world of opposites and that's why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities. ~ Meryl Streep

Law and justice are from time to time inevitably in conflict ... The jury ... adjusts the general rule of law to the justice to the particular case. Thus the odium of inflexible rules of law is avoided, and popular satisfaction is preserved ... That is what jury trial does. It supplies that flexibility of legal rules which is essential to justice and popular contentment. ~ John Henry Wigmore

A brick could be an object to measure your life against. Are you square, rigid, and inflexible? If yes, are you in the military? If no, why are you acting like a brick? ~ Jarod Kintz

A brick could be used to describe somebody hard and inflexible, and a blanket could be used to describe somebody warm and easygoing. ~ Jarod Kintz

You think religions are constant things? inflexible and solid and form full-grown? Religions evolve. They grow out of a need, just like any other natural phenomenon, and they follow the same natural laws. They are born, grown, have sons, and illegitimate sons, and die. ~ James Jones

I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible. ~ Neil Gaiman

The word 'christian' means different things to different people. To one person it means a stiff, upright, inflexible way of life, colorless and unbending. To another it means a risky, surprised-filled adventure, lived tiptoe at the edge of expectation ... If we get our information from the biblical material, there is no doubt that the Christian life is a dancing, leaping, daring life. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

For many of us it seems that to be a feminist in the way that we have seen or understood feminism is to conform to an identity and way of living that doesn't allow for individuality, complexity, or less than perfect personal histories. We fear that the identity will dictate and regulate our lives, instantaneously pitting us against someone, forcing us to choose inflexible and unchanging sides, female against male, black against white, oppressed against oppressor, good against bad. ~ Rebecca Walker

Doomed and knew it, accepted the doom without either seeking or fleeing it. Loved her brother despite him, loved not only him but loved in him that bitter prophet and inflexible corruptless judge of what he considered the family's honor and its doom, as he thought he loved but really hated in her what he considered the frail doomed vessel of its pride and the foul instrument of its disgrace, not only this, she loved him not only in spite of but because of the fact that he himself was incapable of love, accepting the fact that he must value above all not her but the virginity of which she was custodian and on which she placed no value whatever: the frail physical stricture which to her was no more than a hangnail would have been. Knew the brother loved death best of all and was not jealous, would (and perhaps in the calculation and deliberation of her marriage did) have handed him the hypothetical hemlock. Was two months pregnant with another man's child which regardless of what its sex would be she had already named Quentin after the brother whom they both (she and her brother) knew was already the same as dead... ~ William Faulkner

Important principles may and must be inflexible. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Pride is not your friend.
He would have you think he is, that he affords you strength and courage, but in truth he robs you of your health and by slow, diluted degrees steals your might. He is a crafty and cunning liar who would have you think that stubborn, unapologetic, superior, boastful, and popular are admirable traits. Pride would convince you that being right is more crucial than being kind. He would have you sever relationships, even turn your back on family and friends rather than utter a humble apology. To do so is beneath you, pride would say. He would have you fight like a raptor and gnash your teeth while jutting out an inflexible jaw to defend and protect him, regardless of who is hurt in the process. He would use and demean you in order to puff up and fortify himself. He would destroy your life and every meaningful association before casting you aside without a hint of remorse.
Again, Pride is not your friend. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Be patient, do nothing, cease striving. We find this advice disheartening and therefore unfeasible because we forget it is our own inflexible activity that is structuring the reality. We think that if we do not hustle, nothing will happen and we will pine away. But the reality is probably in motion and after a while we might take part in that motion. But one can't know. ~ Paul Goodman

Fixating on the outcome or needing to know all the details of an upcoming event, such as a trip, causes people to be upset when things don't go their way, overly focused on the future, and unable to bounce back easily. Inflexible people are susceptible to anger, distress, and depression. Surrendered people go with the flow, shrug it off when an unplanned situation happens, and tend to be happier, more lighthearted, and resilient. They remember to exhale during stress. ~ Judith Orloff

You really are a know-it-all pain in the ass," I announced snarkily, brushing by him rudely. I stopped quickly at Ellie and Adam to say, "I'm happy for you." And then I hurried by them down the hall to the bathroom to get away from Braden and his perceptive, growly, inflexible ass. ~ Samantha Young

People who are diagnosed as having "generalized anxiety disorder" are afflicted by three major problems that many of us experience to a lesser extent from time to time. First and foremost, says Rapgay, the natural human inclination to focus on threats and bad news is strongly amplified in them, so that even significant positive events get suppressed. An inflexible mentality and tendency toward excessive verbalizing make therapeutic intervention a further challenge. ~ Winifred Gallagher

A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities that people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit's constituent rigor and humility and self-honesty are, in fact, so hard to maintain on certain issues that it's almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp's line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that he other camps are either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them. ~ David Foster Wallace

Very often, organizations are inflexible because there is too little communication between functions; they are too segregated. ~ Ken Robinson

The family I grew up in was very inflexible and harsh. It left me with the feeling that if you do let somebody down badly, then even if they tell you it's all right, it cannot be all right. ~ Michel Faber

M. At this moment, when each of us must fit an arrow to his bow and enter the lists anew, to
reconquer, within history and in spite of it, that which he owns already, the thin yield of his fields, the
brief love of this earth, at this moment when at last a man is born, it is time to forsake our age and its
adolescent furies. The bow bends; the wood complains. At the moment of supreme tension, there will leap
into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is inflexible and free. ~ Albert Camus

This, not incidentally, is another perfect setting for deindividuation: on one side, the functionary behind a wall of security glass following a script laid out with the intention that it should be applied no matter what the specific human story may be, told to remain emotionally disinvested as far as possible so as to avoid preferential treatment of one person over another - and needing to follow that advice to avoid being swamped by empathy for fellow human beings in distress. The functionary becomes a mixture of Zimbardo's prison guards and the experimenter himself, under siege from without while at the same time following an inflexible rubric set down by those higher up the hierarchical chain, people whose job description makes them responsible, but who in turn see themselves as serving the general public as a non-specific entity and believe or have been told that only strict adherence to a system can produce impartial fairness. Fairness is supposed to be vested in the code: no human can or should make the system fairer by exercising judgement. In other words, the whole thing creates a collective responsibility culminating in a blameless loop. Everyone assumes that it's not their place to take direct personal responsibility for what happens; that level of vested individual power is part of the previous almost feudal version of responsibility. The deindividuation is actually to a certain extent the desired outcome, though its negative consequences are not. ~ Nick Harkaway

Narrow minds devoid of
imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped
ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely
fear and loathe. Of course it's important to know what's right and what's wrong.
Individual errors in judgment can usually be corrected. As long as you have the courage
to admit mistakes, things can be turned around. But intolerant, narrow minds with no
imagination are like parasites that transform the host, change form, and continue to
thrive. They're a lost cause ~ Haruki Murakami

This revision of the Constitution will not be perfect. But at least the Constitution will not be inflexible. It will be a step towards the Social Europe which we wish. ~ Laurent Fabius

Shakespeare knows that the tension between men as they are and men as they ought to be will forever remain unresolved. Man's imperfectability is no more an excuse for total permissiveness, however, than are man's imperfections a reason for inflexible intolerance. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

I remain 'torn' (between a 'hyberbolic' ethical vision of forgiveness, pure forgiveness, and the reality of a society at work in pragmatic processes of reconciliation). But without power, desire, or need to decide. The two poles are irreducible to one another, certainly, but they remain indissociable. In order to inflect politics, or what you just called the 'pragmatic processes', in order to change the law (which, thus, finds itself between the two poles, the 'ideal' and the 'empirical' – and what is more important to me here is, between these two, this universalising mediation, this history of the law, the possibility of this progress of the law), it is necessary to refer to a '"hyperbolic" ethical vision of forgiveness'. Even if I were not sure of the words 'vision' or 'ethics' in this case, let us say that only this inflexible exigence can orient a history of laws, and evolution of the law. It alone can inspire here, now, in the urgency, without waiting, response and responsibilities. ~ Jacques Derrida

The revolution is made neither by the leaders for the people, nor by the people for the leaders, but by both acting together in unshakable solidarity. This solidarity is born only when the leaders witness to it by their humble, loving, and courageous encounter with the people. Not all men and women have sufficient courage for this encounter--but when they avoid encounter they become inflexible and treat others as mere objects; instead of nurturing life, they kill life; instead of searching for life, they flee from it. And these are oppressor characteristics. ~ Paulo Freire

Hardin, as he sat at the foot of the table, speculated idly as to just what it was that made physical scientists such poor administrators. It might be merely that they were too used to inflexible fact and far too unused to pliable people. ~ Isaac Asimov

Because life is a game and we're all just trading cards. We play the right hand to get ahead." I studied the smiling, ignorant face of Sal as he stared at his bride. "Death stops the game. It's too final, too inflexible. Death is viciously stubborn. ~ Karina Halle

How many vampires do you think have the stamina for immortality? They have the most dismal notions of immortality to begin with. For in becoming immortal they want all the forms of their life to be fixed as they are and incorruptible: carriages made in the same dependable fashion, clothing of the cut which suited their prime, men attired and speaking in the manner they have always understood and valued. When, in fact, all things change except the vampire himself; everything except the vampire is subject to constant corruption and distortion. Soon, with an inflexible mind, and often even with the most flexible mind, this immortality becomes a penitential sentence in a madhouse of figures and forms that are hopelessly unintelligible and without value. ~ Anne Rice

And it was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline, that a good soldier should dread his officers far more than the enemy. ~ Edward Gibbon

But he had seen so little of life and the world himself, that he could scarcely help being one-sided and narrow-minded; and as he would not avail himself of his father's wider knowledge, what remained but to make mistakes? So, priding himself on an inflexible firmness in matters of "principle," however small, he confounded together things indifferent and important; did even wise ones foolishly; and attempted others which were neither wise, nor worth a hundredth part of the offence they created. "We ~ Mrs. Alfred Gatty

Huge organisations and me don't get along. They're too inflexible, waste too much time, have too many stupid people. ~ Haruki Murakami

I think that it is a fallacy to suppose that helpful cooperation in the future will be assured by the attempted compulsion of an inflexible rule. Rather will such cooperation depend upon the fostering of firm friendships springing from an appreciation of community ideals, interests, and purposes, and such friendships are more likely to be promoted by freedom of conference than by the effort to create hard and fast engagements. ~ Charles Evans Hughes

To accuse me of being too inflexible is poppycock. ~ Margaret Thatcher

Huh! Mankind always comes up with ideas to make up for the follies of the status quo. But what happens if those ideas are inflexible and fail to respond to the changing times. They end up betraying the people who believed in them. ~ Janvier Chouteu-Chando

But their refuge had been a dead end; all that inflexible old guard could do was to die and let younger minds, still limber, take over. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the cannon's mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is empty. If it is loaded my immortal and inflexible purpose is to get over the fence and go home. My invariable practice in war has been to bring out of every fight two-thirds more men than when I went in. This seems to me Napoleonic in its grandeur. ~ Mark Twain

The strange flavour of AI work is that people try to put together long sets of rules in strict formalisms which tell inflexible machines how to be flexible. ~ Douglas Hofstadter

I became an actor in that important drama with an inflexible resolution to persevere through the last scene, when we might be permitted and acknowledged to enjoy what we had so nobly declared we would possess, or lose with our lives - Freedom and Independence! ~ Deborah Sampson

Grantaire, earthbound in doubt, loved to watch Enjolras soaring in the upper air of faith. He needed Enjolras. Without being fully aware of it, or seeking to account for it himself, he was charmed by that chaste, upright, inflexible and candid nature. ~ Victor Hugo

In such a world as this, with such hearts as ours, weakness is wickedness in the long run. Whoever lets himself be shaped and guided by any thing lower than an inflexible will, fixed in obedience to God, will in the end be shaped into a deformity, and guided to wreck and ruin ~ Alexander MacLaren

To get rich, one must have but a single idea, one fixed, hard, immutable thought: the desire to make a heap of gold. And in order to increase this heap of gold, one must be inflexible, a usurer, thief, extortionist, and murderer! And one must especially mistreat the small and the weak!
And when this mountain of gold has been amassed, one can climb up on it, and from up on the summit, a smile on one's lips, one can contemplate the valley of poor wretches that one has created. ~ Petrus Borel

If I now consider man in his isolated capacity, I find that dogmatic belief is no less indispensable to him in order to live alone than it is to enable him to co-operate with his fellows. If man were
forced to demonstrate for himself all the truths of which he makes daily use, his task would never end. He would exhaust his strength in preparatory demonstrations without ever advancing beyond them.
As, from the shortness of his life, he has not the time, nor, from the limits of his intelligence, the capacity, to act in this way, he is reduced to take on trust a host of facts and opinions
which he has not had either the time or the power to verify for
himself, but which men of greater ability have found out, or which
the crowd adopts. On this groundwork he raises for himself the structure of his own thoughts; he is not led to proceed in this manner by choice, but is constrained by the inflexible law of
his condition. There is no philosopher in the world so great but that he believes a million things on the faith of other people and accepts a great many more truths than he demonstrates. (Tocqueville 1945 2:9-10; Oeuvres Completes (M) 1(2):16-17, (B) 3:15-16). ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Humans are similar to plasticine. Society is the pattern, but a pattern has the characteristics of being inflexible, hard, and unbreakable, while plasticine has the characteristics of being pliable, soft, metamorphic, and expandable. The current situation clearly shows us how the mass of plasticine no longer fits into that narrow social pattern. ~ Paola Sanjinez

The next time you pick up a camera think of it not as an inflexible and automated robot, but as a flexible instrument which you must understand to properly use. An electronic and optical miracle creates nothing on its own! Whatever beauty and excitement it can represent exist in your mind and spirit to begin with. ~ Ansel Adams

Poverty is not something people impose on themselves for want of effort and community organisation. It is constructed by divisive and discriminatory laws, inflexible organisations, acquisitive ideologies of wealth, a deeply rooted class system and policies which serve privilege in the short term and destroy society in the long term. ~ Pete Townshend

To be on a journey of the spirit and follow the path of any god requires either a rigidly inflexible adherence to dogma or a tremendous sense of humor; ~ Robert J. Crane

The path to your success is not as fixed and inflexible as you think. ~ Misty Copeland

Nature will not let us stay in any one place for too long. She will let us stay just long enough to gather the experience necessary to the unfolding and advancement of the soul. This is a wise provision, for should we stay there too long, we would become too set, too rigid, too inflexible. Nature demands change in order that we may advance. ~ Ernest Holmes

We have said that Athos loved d'Artagnan like a child, and this somber and inflexible personage felt the anxiety of a parent for the young man. ~ Alexandre Dumas

The artist glanced at the inflexible image of king, commander, dame, and allegory, that stood around, on the best of which might have been bestowed the questionable praise that it looked as if a living man had here been changed to wood, and that not only the physical, but the intellectual and spiritual part, partook of the stolid transformation. But in not a single instance did it seem as if the wood were imbibing the ethereal essence of humanity. What a wide distinction is here! and how far the slightest portion of the latter merit have outvalued the utmost degree of the former! ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

German businessmen are overwhelmed by the high cost of doing business. Inflexible rules, enforced by a burgeoning bureaucracy, discourage entrepreneurship. ~ Suzanne Fields

She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time. ~ Azar Nafisi

Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country. ~ Maximilien Robespierre

Our peasant music, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in the sense that the inflexible major and minor system is tonal. (An "atonal" folk-music, in my opinion, is unthinkable.) Since we depend upon a tonal basis of this kind in our creative work, it is quite self-evident that our works are quite pronouncedly tonal in type. I must admit, however, that there was a time when I thought I was approaching a species of twelve-tone music. Yet even in works of that period the absolute tonal foundation is unmistakable. ~ Bela Bartok

Il y a deux sortes d'esprits, l'un ge ome trique, et l'autre que l'on peut appeler de finesse. Le premier a des vues lentes, dures et inflexibles; mais le dernier a une souplesse de pense e. There are two kinds of mind, one mathematical, the other what one might call the intuitive. The first takes a slow, firm, inflexible view, but the latter has flexibility of thought. ~ Blaise Pascal

As it is my practice here to conceal nothing, I shall relate on this page the episode of the wall. Virigilia and Lobo Neves were soon to sail. Entering Dona Placida's house, I saw on the table a folded piece of paper. It was a note from Virgilia. It said that she would be waiting for me in the garden at sundown, without fail. It concluded, "The wall is low on the side toward the little path."
I made a gesture of displeasure. The letter seemed to me extraordinary audacious, ill-considered, and even ridiculous. It not only invited scandal, it invited it together with laughter and sneers. I pictured myself leaping over the wall and caught in the act by an officer of the law, who led me off to jail. "The wall is low…" And what if it was low? Obviously Virgilia did not know what she was doing; perhaps by now she wished she had not sent the note. I looked at it, a small piece of paper, wrinkled by inflexible. I felt an urge to tear it in thirty thousand pieces and to throw it to the wind as the last vestige of my adventure; but I did not do so. Self-love, shame at the thought of fleeing from danger…There was no way out; I would have to go.
"Tell her I'll go."
"Where?" asked Dona Placida.
"Where she said she would wait for me."
"She said nothing to me."
"In this note."
Dona Placida stared. "But this paper, I found it this morning in your drawer, and I thought that…"
I felt a queer sensation. I reread the paper and looked at it a long t ~ Machado De Assis

The world, that is, of earthquake and cataclysm, cyclone and devastation; the violent matrix, the real world of unmastered, unmasterable physical stress that is entirely inimical to man because of its indifference. Ocean, forest, mountain, weather - these are the inflexible institutions of that world of unquestionable reality which is so far removed from the social institutions which make up our own world that we men must always, whatever our difference, conspire to ignore them. For otherwise we would be forced to acknowledge our incomparable insignificance and the insignificance of those desires that might be the pyrotechnic tigers of our world and yet, under the cold moon and the frigid round dance of the unspeakably alien planets, are nothing but toy animals cut from coloured paper. ~ Angela Carter

A person who holds strong convictions might appear inflexible, impolite, or exceptionally obtuse, when they are merely direct. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Some parents have taught their small children, "Go to the manager," but this poses the same problem of identification as with the policeman: That small name tag is several feet above the child's eye-line. I don't believe in teaching inflexible rules because it's not possible to know they'll apply in all situations. There is one, however, that reliably enhances safety: Teach children that if they are ever lost, Go to a Woman. Why? First, if your child selects a woman, it's highly unlikely that the woman will be a sexual predator. Next, as Jan's story illustrates, a woman approached by a lost child asking for help is likely to stop whatever she is doing, commit to that child, and not rest until the child is safe. A man approached by a small child might say, "Head over there to the manager's desk," whereas a woman will get involved and stay involved. ~ Gavin De Becker

We all know that any emotional bias
irrespective of truth or falsity
can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value ... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

I think there's a greater detriment with our escalating progression toward the opposite extremity - the increasingly common ideology that assures people they're right about what they believe. And note that I used the word "detriment." I did not use the word "danger," because I don't think the notion of people living under the misguided premise that they're right is often dangerous. Most day-to-day issues are minor, the passage of time will dictate who was right and who was wrong, and the future will sort out the past. It is, however, socially detrimental. It hijacks conversation and aborts ideas. It engenders a delusion of simplicity that benefits people with inflexible minds. It makes the experience of living in a society slightly worse than it should be. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Dialogue is a token of genuine Christian love, because it indicates our steadfast resolve to rid our minds of the prejudices and caricatures that we may entertain about other people, to struggle to listen through their ears and look through their eyes so as to grasp what prevents them from hearing the gospel and seeing Christ, to sympathize with them in all their doubts, fears and "hang-ups." For such sympathy will involve listening, and listening means dialogue. It is once more the challenge of the incarnation, to renounce evangelism by inflexible slogans, and instead to involve ourselves sensitively in the real dilemmas that people face. ~ John R.W. Stott

A final point is the fact that discrimination based on presumed inborn and immutable characteristics (race) tends to be stronger and more inflexible than ethnic discrimination which is not based on 'racial' differences. Members of a presumed race cannot change their assumed inherited traits, while ethnic groups can change their culture and, ultimately, ~ Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Ultimately, leadership is about the strength of one's convictions, the ability to endure the punches, and the energy to promote an idea. And I have found that those who do achieve peace never acquiesce to obstacles, especially those constructed of bigotry, intolerance, and inflexible tradition. ~ Benazir Bhutto

It occurred to Liz one day, as she waited on hold for an estimate from a yard service, that her parents' home was like an extremely obese person who could no longer see, touch, or maintain jurisdiction over all of his body; there was simply too much of it, and he - they - had grown weary and inflexible. During ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

Psychologists call this cognitive impenetrability: our conscious understanding of the situation is unable to penetrate a compelling perception generated by relatively inflexible mechanisms that interpret visual contours, surfaces, and shapes. ~ John C. Wathey

Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it. The soft overcomes the hard; the gentle overcomes the rigid. Everyone knows this is true, but few can put it into practice. Therefore the Master remains serene in the midst of sorrow. Evil cannot enter his heart. Because he has given up helping, he is people's greatest help. True words seem paradoxical. ~ Laozi

I anticipate the day when to command respect in the remotest regions it will be sufficient to say I am an American. Our flag shall then wave in glory over the ocean and our commerce feel no restraint but what our own government may impose. Happy thrice happy day. Thank God, to reach this envied state we need only to will. Yes my countrymen. Our destiny depends on our will. But if we would stand high on the record of time that will must be inflexible. ~ Gouverneur Morris

So much in life seems inflexible and unchangeable, and part of the joy of running and especially racing is the realization that improvement and progress can be achieved. ~ Nancy Anderson

For a bag of pepper, they could cut each other's throats without hesitation, and would forswear their souls ... The bizarre obstinacy of that desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes; the unknown seas, the loathsome diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence and despair. It made them great! By heavens! It made them heroic; and it made them pathetic, too, in their craving for trade with the inflexible death levying its toll on young and old ~ Joseph Conrad

Always been a goal-oriented girl. it was both her strength and her weakness. She had a drive to completion that always gets things done, but it also made her inflexible, and stubborn.
Everlost ~ Neal Shusterman

But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they're doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don't want to. Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas – none of them bother me. I don't care what banner they raise. But what I can't stand are hollow people. [...]
Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe. Of course it's important to know what's right and what's wrong. Individual errors in judgment can usually be corrected. As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around. But intolerant, narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host, change form, and continue to thrive. ~ Haruki Murakami

A man makes himself hard and inflexible in order to escape his guiltiness. The strange paradox present on every page of the Gospels and which we can verify any day, is that it is not guilt which is the obstacle to grace, as moralism supposes. On the contrary, it is the repression of guilt, self-justification, genuine self-righteousness and smugness which is the obstacle. ~ Paul Tournier

It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from a more complex life form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another-the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter ~ William S. Burroughs

In young women, I find that a feeling of anxiety is normal and moves to the forefront of repressed feelings when the possibility of fulfilment of the wish first appears. It is a well-defined form of anxiety: You feel that the enemy is within; its characteristic ardour compels you, with inflexible urgency, to do what you do not want to do; you feel the end, the transient, before which you vainly may attempt to flee to an uncertain future. You might ask: Is this all? Is this the high point with nothing more beyond? ~ Sabina Spielrein

You adhere to a philosophy, but part of the philosophy I have is that I don't want to be too doggone inflexible that I miss a good player. ~ Marv Levy

An inflexible tree breaks in a storm. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

What's inflexible breaks in the end, ~ Carmen Caine

I say now, however, as I have all the while said, that on the territorial question - that is, the question of extending slavery under the national auspices, - I am inflexible. I am for no compromise which assists or permits the extension of the institution on soil owned by the nation. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Right angles don't attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man. ~ Oscar Niemeyer

[Joseph Bucklin Bishop said] "...The peculiarity about him is that he has what is essentially a boy's mind. What he thinks he says at once, says aloud. It is his distinguishing characteristic, and I don't know as he will ever outgrow it. But with it he has great qualities which make him an invaluable public servant--inflexible honesty, absolute fearlessness, and devotion to good government which amounts to religion. We must let him work his way, for nobody can induce him to change it. ~ Edmund Morris

Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change ~ Peter Drucker

To be famous is to be stuck in an inflexible place. But at least it is to be stuck with money. ~ Spalding Gray

Their habits and experiences made them inflexible, welding their routines in place, cementing their hurts and joys to create expectations of life that were not in line with the new realities. ~ Sophie Littlefield

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The Machinery are a bunch of fuckwits who believe that the human body is best conceptualised as a machine, and that if behaviour is stripped down to only what is functional, a higher form of humanity will emerge. This means actions that lead to the fulfilment of their basic needs only. Disease is a malfunction. You can see where this goes. They're boring as hell, they only speak to convey information and they are more inflexible than actual machines. They are said to be good spouses and accountants. The one beside me has a distinct self-image, fully identified as a machine. He repeats to himself mentally, 'You are a machine, you are a machine. ~ Tade Thompson

The dancer's grace and, forty years on, her arthritis - both are functions of the skeleton. It is thanks to an inflexible framework of bones that the girl is able to do her pirouettes, thanks to the same bones, grown a little rusty, that the grandmother is condemned to a wheel chair. Analogously, the firm support of a culture is the prime condition of all individual originality and creativeness; it is also their principal enemy. The thing in whose absence we cannot possibly grow into complete human beings is, all too often, the thing that prevents us from growing. ~ Aldous Huxley

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

It [ballet] projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision. ~ Ayn Rand

Reflect on these words from John Brown, a nineteenth-century Scottish pastor and theologian: Nothing is so well fitted to put the fear of God, which will preserve men from offending him, into the heart, as an enlightened view of the cross of Christ. There shine spotless holiness, inflexible justice, incomprehensible wisdom, omnipotent power, holy love. None of these excellencies darken or eclipse the other, but every one of them rather gives a lustre to the rest. They mingle their beams, and shine with united eternal splendour: the just Judge, the merciful Father, the wise Governor. Nowhere does justice appear so awful, mercy so amiable, or wisdom so profound. ~ Jerry Bridges

These ceremonies and the National Statuary Hall will teach the youth of the land in succeeding generations as they come and go that the chief end of human effort in a sublunary view should be usefulness to mankind, and that all true fame which should be perpetuated by public pictures, statues, and monuments, is to be acquired only by noble deeds and high achievements and the establishment of a character founded upon the principles of truth, uprightness, and inflexible integrity. ~ Alexander H. Stephens

Even though copying what's come before is a guaranteed path to mediocrity, it appears to be a safe choice, and the desire to be safe - to succeed with minimal risk - can infect not just individuals but also entire companies. If we sense that our structures are rigid, inflexible, or bureaucratic, we must bust them open - without destroying ourselves in the process. ~ Ed Catmull

It was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline that good soldier should dread his own officers far more than the enemy ~ Edward Gibbon

There was only one bar of that name, in a back street of an inner suburb. I had already modified the day's schedule, cancelling my market trip to catch up on the lost sleep. I would purchase a ready-made dinner instead. I am sometimes accused of being inflexible, but I think this demonstrates an ability to adapt to even the strangest of circumstances. ~ Graeme Simsion

The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes...was never mine. It is only the sanguinary hue of our penal laws which I meant to object to. Punishments I know are necessary, and I would provide them strict and inflexible, but proportioned to the crime. Death might be inflicted for murder and perhaps for treason, [but I] would take out of the description of treason all crimes which are not such in their nature. Rape, buggery, etc., punish by castration. All other crimes by working on high roads, rivers, gallies, etc., a certain time proportioned to the offence... Laws thus proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with. Let mercy be the character of the lawgiver, but let the judge be a mere machine. The mercies of the law will be dispensed equally and impartially to every description of men; those of the judge or of the executive power will be the eccentric impulses of whimsical, capricious designing man. ~ Thomas Jefferson

I've always thought the Right-wing were ones that were inflexible and intolerant,and now I'm coming to realize that the orthodoxy at NPR, it's representing the Left. ~ Juan Williams

Lf the attribute of popular government in peace is virtue, the attribute of popular government in revolution is at one and the same time virtue and terror, virtue without which terror is fatal, terror without which virtue is impotent. The terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue. ~ Maximilien Robespierre

But the real fun of writing, for me at least, is the experience of making a set of givens yield. There's an incredibly inflexible set of instruments - our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression. You write something down and it's awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate. But with effort you can get it to become a little flexible, a little transparent. You can get it to open up, and expose something lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down. When you add a comma or add or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it's so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time. ~ Deborah Eisenberg

A genetic fundamentalism permeates public awareness these days. It may be summed up as the belief that almost every illness and every human trait is dictated by heredity. Simplified media accounts, culled from semidigested research findings, have declared that inflexible laws of DNA rule the biological world. It was reported in 1996 that according to some psychologists, genes determine about 50 percent of a person's inclination to experience happiness. Social ability and obesity are two more among the many human qualities now claimed to be genetic.

True or not, narrow genetic explanations for ADD and every other condition of the mind do have their attractions. They are easy to grasp, socially conservative and psychologically soothing. They raise no uncomfortable questions about how a society and culture might erode the health of its members, or about how life in a family may have affected a person's physiology or emotional makeup. As I have personally experienced, feelings of guilt are almost inevitable for the parents of a troubled child. They are all too frequently reinforced by the uninformed judgments of friends, neighbors, teachers or even total strangers on the bus or in the supermarket. Parental guilt, even if misplaced, is a wound for which the genetic hypothesis offers a balm ~ Gabor Mate