Word: inertia
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...have justified my judgment," Lewis wrote. "I did not think you would do anything. You didn't. You rarely do. Unfortunately, you follow invariably your well-known policy of anxious inertia...
British Novelist E. M. Forster (A Passage to India) told the American Academy of Arts and Letters that in pessimistic moments he thought that "man's best chance for harmony lies in apathy, uninventiveness and inertia . . . Universal exhaustion would certainly be a new experience. The human race has never undergone it, and it is still too perky to admit that it ... might result in a sprouting of new growth through decay...
...country." In just over three years in office, Dutra has not only restored the constitution but made it the guide for his every act. He takes its description of his limited powers so literally that the press now criticizes him, savagely on occasion, for his "government by inertia." It is a rare occasion when he gets off a message to Congress, as he did three weeks ago, "taking the liberty to insist" that it get along with its work...
...Student Apathy League, Harvard's only side of the road political organization, came sleepkwalking into its second term yesterday. Boasting no boosters, solicitors, or lapel snatchers the apathy league holds together its 3000 odd members by the sheer force of inertia...
...that try to find out whether a candidate knows what the examiners know, not what the candidate himself knows; they stifle medical progress by "withholding approval of the new by insistent emphasis on expert knowledge of the old"; they become "partners of static and reactionary, albeit powerful and respectable, inertia or ignorance." Dr. Gregg's suggestion: pick specialists by their competence in practice...