It is difficult indeed to understand the ego in its depth and devious ways. It is an inert entity, that is to say, it cannot know itself not can it know others; It has no fear; it will not bend before others; it degrades man from the golden glory, which is his due, to the level of lowly dust.
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Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses -- those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence.
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The mechanism that directs government cannot be virtuous, because it is impossible to thwart every crime, to protect oneself from every criminal without being criminal too; that which directs corrupt mankind must be corrupt itself; and it will never be by means of virtue, virtue being inert and passive, that you will maintain control over vice, which is ever active: the governor must be more energetic than the governed.
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Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time. ...Its idea of meeting a problem is to hold hearings or, in extreme cases, to appoint a com...
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Men of genius are often dull and inert in society, as a blazing meteor when it descends to earth, is only a stone.
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It is because the public are a mass -- inert, obtuse, and passive -- that they need to be shaken up from time to time so that we can tell from their bear-like grunts where they are -- and also where they stand. They are pretty harmless, in spite of their numbers, because they are fighting against intelligence.
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Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
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