Word: inertia
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...forebears lost. Near the book's end, he tries to rescue a cow that is in danger of drowning in mud. The task is mock-heroic, emblematic of the best he can expect from existence. But he struggles furiously, engaged in the grubbiness of life through an inertia of commitment that is stronger than protective cynicism...
...minimal. About all they now have to do is once in a while vote at some general meeting. Meanwhile the rulers of the state and the other propagators of ideology sincerely believe in their ideology and many of them have devoted themselves to it out of long years of inertia, out of ignorance and man's peculiar psychological habit of developing a philosophy to justify his main sphere of activity...
...also, it appears, crucially overloaded, sloppily sailed, sketchily regulated for safety and steadily dangerous. The problem is partly a matter of scale, a dramatic change that-as Lemuel Gulliver learned to his sorrow-can be catastrophic. Especially in congested shipping lanes, the V.L.C.C.s are simply too big and too inertia-bound to operate safely by current rules of navigation. (Among other things, Mostert urges the establishment of onshore control towers like those now handling flight patterns around jet airports...
Fairbank begins with a stunningly impressive analysis, written in 1946, on the prospects for democracy in China at that time. They were nil, he concluded, not only because the Communists were more vigorous and popular than the American-backed Kuomintang, but also because "the inertia of tradition" did not permit Western-style solutions in China. Fairbank was of course right, and since that essay-as textbook writer, as target of the McCarthy campaign, as a mover and shaker in the field of Asian studies in the U.S.-he has stuck to his main theme. The great Confucian system of government...
...spontaneous oil sketches and color notes that fill the Musée Moreau in Paris-for that dynamism that animated Moreau's romantic predecessors, Delacroix and Chassériau. Rather, it is a delight of surface. To fix it, Moreau resorted to what he called the "beauty of inertia." He noted of Michelangelo, whom he adored: "All these figures seem fixed in a gesture of ideal somnambulism; they are unconscious of the movements they make." Once immobilized, the figures in his allegorical paintings-Oedipus, Salome and the like-could then be loaded with accessories, encrusted with redundant decoration...