Stasis Quotes

Darwin’s prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.

Ancient and oriental civilizations were more sensitive than we are to the cycles of things; to the succession of generations, both divine and human; and to change within stasis. Western man is virtually alone in wanting to make his God into a fortress and personal immortality into a bulwark against time.

Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin’s argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study.

Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.

Maybe it’ll be like ‘The Simpsons,’ and everybody will remain unchanged. Maybe that’s what ‘Glee”s about. Maybe this is kind of a stasis show. I don’t know.

I can never quite decide whether the anti-Columbus movement is merely risible or faintly sinister. It is sinister, though, because it is an ignorant celebration of stasis and backwardness, with an unpleasant tinge of self-hatred.

When we ask for heaven, we are asking for stasis. A form of comfort that will last for eternity. Yes, that is what we all want, the way we understand happiness.

Faction is the greatest evil and the most common danger. “Faction” is the conventional English translation of the Greek stasis, one of the most remarkable words to be found in any language.

Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

It’s stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition.

Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

Is not our chief neurosis – by which I mean our estrangement from nature – our desire to hold fast to what is forever transforming, to freeze the familiar, to submit motion to stasis, to solicit immortality through rigidity.

One of the aspects of form that I have been very interested in is stasis – the concept of form which is not so directional in time, not so much climactic form, but rather form which allows time, to stand still.

[Barack Obama] says that he thinks America felt better, more confident, because Washington was not simply in a gridlock, in stasis, where nothing was being done. And he talks about that as a positive.

It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of families, appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual completely continuous transitional sequences.

Darwinism is dynamic. It is about change, not stasis; about process, not pattern; about tales, not tableaux; about becoming, not being.

And there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.

Disaster beats stasis. Better a rolling stone than a moss-covered rock.