Word: inertia
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...Teacher, Quick. In the U.S., at least, inertia has been fostered by a crushing weight of institutional responsibility. In Loyola's time, the Jesuits were a mobile spiritual commando of shock troops, kept free of routine and organization to serve God and the Pope as need arose. Today, the American provinces are hard put to staff an awesome ecclesiastical machine that supports in the U.S. alone, 28 colleges and universities, 51 high schools, 24 national publications, and ten seminaries. As a result, the scholarly careers of promising men are sometimes delayed or curtailed by immediate institutional needs. "The percentage...
Certain times and places are themselves causes. Having food handy causes eating. Midnight causes eating. The whole is a mechanical chain reaction, in which the original stimulus is relatively unimportant. A diet is solely a question of habit and inertia...
Illness, or age, or simple inertia may leave him unqualified for his job, but the judge who deals daily with the lives, liberty and property of people forced to come before him may have been appointed for life. If so, he can be fired only for gross misconduct. If he has been elected, it usually takes some sort of major scandal to unseat him. Is there no other way by which the honest but unfit judge can be removed from the bench when necessary...
...while we were little more than undeveloped oogoniums rattling around some place, organic chemistry was indeed a most crucial subject for premeds. It reflected to a great extent the material that had to be mastered in medical schools. But since then, medical school curriculum has undergone fundamental transformations. Inertia is itself a fundamental element of any change, however, and it seems to have sustained over the years an overblown emphasis on organic chemistry, especially among undergraduates...
Thomas, a native Mississippian and graduate of the Ole Miss law school, went on to criticize Mississippi's own courts for archaic customs and "adherence, by acquiescence, inertia or other wise, to the 'sporting theory of justice,' which makes justice a game instead of a quest for truth." He even urged the state to emulate federal courts and catch up with other states by approving modern pretrial discovery techniques and summary judgments (where there are no real factual issues) "for the removal of sham actions from the trial calendars." If Thomas surprised his listeners, who included...