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Resistance
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“The process of education is not generally a process of teaching people to think and ask questions. It ... is mostly one of teaching the young what is and getting them into a mood where they will go on keeping it that way.”
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“There is a strong conservative instinct in the average man or woman, born of the hereditary fear of life, that prompts them to cling to old standards, or, if too intelligent to look inhospitably upon progress, to move very slowly. Both types are the brakes and wheelhorses necessary to a stable civilization, but history, even current history in the newspapers, would be dull reading if there were no adventurous spirits willing to do battle for new ideas.”
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“The world is equally astonished—and resentful—at every new discovery, but it in a short time accepts it as a commonplace.”
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“Human progress had so often been checked by those who were afraid of losing what they had.”
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“... there is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change.”
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“There is always new life trying to emerge in each of us. Too often we ignore the signs of resurrection and cling to parts of life that have died for us.”
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“Constancy, far from being a virtue, seems often to be the besetting sin of the human race, daughter of laziness and self-sufficiency, sister of sleep, the cause of most wars and practically all persecutions.”
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“Progress? It ought to be stopped, that's what I say. If the Lord meant chickens to come out of incubators he'd never have made hens, it stands to reason.”
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“Resistance, which is the function of conservatism, is essential to orderly advance.”
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“The hardest thing to believe when you're young is that people wil fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of it.”
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“... the only difference between a rut and a grave, as someone had observed before him, is in their dimensions.”
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“We are pushed forward by the social forces, reluctant and stumbling, our faces over our shoulders, clutching at every relic of the past as we are forced along; still adoring whatever is behind us. We insist upon worshipping 'the God of our fathers.' Why not the God of our children? Does eternity only stretch one way?”
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“We found that during the period of 1900 to 2006, nonviolent resistance campaigns were about twice as effective as violent ones in achieving their immediate goals ...”
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“... the average nonviolent campaign is something like four times larger than the average violent campaign, and, in general, we can see in our data that the nonviolent campaigns are far superior at eliciting active participation.”
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“When civil resistance campaigns prevail, they tend to enshrine norms of consent. Whereas, with an armed struggle, the norms that are being generated during the campaign generally tend to be more martial values. So when armed campaigns win, usually if they win by the sword they rule by the sword. ... how you fight determines in large part how you're going to rule when you win.”
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“Wolf's wool is the best of wool, / but it cannot be sheared because / the wolf will not comply.”
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“There are two kinds of men and women, those who have in them resisting as their way of winning those who have in them attacking as their way of winning ...”
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“Tanis was an underminer, but people can't undermine you if you don't let yourself be undermined.”
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“They clung like barnacles to the sunken keel of the style and tastes of the 'Nineties.”
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“Survival is a form of resistance.”
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“His house was so ordered, the same things were every day performed there so punctually to the minute, that any change was impossible. The two old aunts who directed his establishment, the servants, the very horses, could not to-morrow have acted differently from yesterday; nay, the furniture, which had served three generations, would have started of its own accord had any thing new approached it.”
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“Love clamors far more incessantly and passionately at a closed gate than an open one!”
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“His hatred of her was the hatred of the old for the new, of the traditional for the innovative, of the dying for the living.”
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“There can be no real peace without justice. And without resistance there will be no justice.”
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“Consistency can be a trap, especially if it leads to being consistently wrong rather than to stopping, admitting your mistake, and changing course.”
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“... what we resist persists.”