Word: inertia
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...Stevenson was the daring young man on a political trapeze; in 1956 he has too often sounded like a prematurely elder statesman. In 1952 the backroom boys eyed him skeptically; now he has been maneuvered into the role of Democratic regular, identified with the record of indecision, inertia and total surrender compiled by Democratic Senate Leader Lyndon Johnson. On matters ranging from civil rights to the gas giveaway, Stevenson lowered his voice to the point of inaudibility; the effectiveness of his thrusts against the Administration has been dimmed by his tacit apologia for the Democratic record...
...bringing a weight to help acceleration and then asking officials if it was permitted. It was not allowed, and the weight was removed. I was not as confident as TIME'S reporter that added weight would have helped -that any increase in traction would offset the increased inertia. If it had been allowed, I would have experimented with the best results, with and without the added weight. As it was, I did not hope to smuggle a 200 or 300-lb. block of iron, lying on the trunk floor, through a microscopic inspection. Aside from moral and racing considerations...
There was no such barrier on the Feather River, where the proposed $400 million concrete Oroville Dam, planned as the world's largest, is still a paper dream tabled by legislative inertia. The Feather went berserk. It swept madly to its confluence with the Yuba River in the peach country just southwest of Marysville (pop. 12,500) and Yuba City (pop. 8,000). Advised to flee across the river to their sister town, the people of Marysville quickly found themselves scrambling for their lives in Yuba City, where the flood demolished levees while dikes held fast in Marysville...
There may be reasons which do not appear that keep Washington officials from making the most of it. One could be an unwillingness to engage in a game of bluff. Involved, too, it seems, is the inertia of bureaucracy, the latent fear of miscalculation, a belief that doing nothing is apt to be safer than doing something. In psychological warfare the imponderables predominate. However, that is not an argument for doing nothing, but for doing what needs to be done promptly, thoroughly, and effectively...
...asked his sponsorship. Einstein's otherworldliness grew more pronounced. "The wish to withdraw into myself," he wrote, "increases with the years." But though his political forays were often Utopian, his scientific imagination still soared. He had unified the concepts of space and time, matter and energy, gravitation and inertia, yet two great cosmic forces, gravitation and electromagnetism, still defied his synthesis...