Word: inertia
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...determined, intelligent man, and is wholly admirable as a person, but there is no attempt made to hide the inherent weaknesses of his position. It is admitted that if people are allowed to choose their own courses free from dictation, they will blunder as often as proceed wisely. The inertia and occasional impotence of democracy are freely conceded. The communist is allowed to write a novel about the squalor that our economic system allows, as seen in the sharecroppers of the Mississippi delta...
...smoke-filled committee rooms at Washington the Ramspeck bill is, of course, singularly unpopular; in the nation at large, however, a different verdict is rendered. The most notorious of Jacksonian institutions must be destroyed. However great the senatorial inertia, however difficult the abandonment of old practices, however pleasant the rewarding of loyal friends with the juicy plums of public office, the day of judgement is at hand. Civil service reform has been postponed long enough; the time for action has arrived...
...such a long period, the usual length being two week and one week time limits. When a book is charged out for a month at a time, the student is tempted to dawdle in using the book and to keep it out up to the limit through sheer inertia, while others who may need the book in short order are told that it is out, due back in a month...
...meal with a member of the faculty. The sight of professor and young man separating at the dining-hall entrance, each hieing himself off to his own little group, is not an unusual one. Though the undergraduates and sometimes the faculty may deplore the condition, nothing is done. Inertia seems to have gripped everyone. Most of us are too lazy to rise to object...
...debating at Harvard the significance of such reforms lies in the fact that the Debating Council has recognized two elemental characteristics of human nature; that every man is a debater at heart, but that he is likewise apt to be bound by inertia. It has announced a plan whereby the inexhaustible wealth of government and philosophy section orators may be brought within the scope of organized debating. It has seen in the breasts of many men in the impersonal public speaking courses a burning desire to take part in organized debating. It has realized that it can offer a laboratory...