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The consensus is a very dangerous thing to get complacent about.
Sep 26, 2025
# "I saw the most beautiful cat today. It was sitting by the side of the road, its two front feet neatly and graciously together. Then it gravely swished around its tail to completely encircle itself. It was so fit and beautifully neat, that gesture, and so self-satisfied, so complacent.
Break eggs to make omlettes, never be complacent or think 'I've got a career here, I've got to keep it going'.
Complacency is the enemy of study. We cannot really learn anything until we rid ourselves of complacency.
Competition is always a good thing. It forces us to do our best. A monopoly renders people complacent and satisfied with mediocrity.
Fat is mainstream, which is why everyone has become complacent. What used to be considered pudgy before isn't even worthy of a comment today.
Christianity is not the faith of the complacent, the comfortable or of the timid. It demands and creates heroic souls.
It's just, you can get very complacent if you do the same thing all the time and especially the comedian, it gives me you know different things to react to and respond to, and it stimulates me.
A wise man knows; learn from others, never get complacent and know where the classic old dangers come from.
I wake up every morning excited. Rather than become complacent or overwhelmed, I've made a choice for life - and I can do something about it.
You can call me a lot of things, but you can't call me complacent!
You want to have butterflies in your stomach, because if you don't, if you walk out onstage complacent, that's not a good thing.
She looked into the staring glass eyes and complacent face, and suddenly a sort of heartbroken rage seized her. She lifted her little savage hand and knocked Emily off the chair, bursting into a passion of sobbing- Sara who never cried.
As long as Negro leader is making the white man think that our people are satisfied to sit in his house and wait for him to correct these conditions, he is - he is misrepresenting the thinking of the black masses, and he's doing the white man a disservice because he's making the white man be more complacent than he would be if he knew the dangerous situation that is building up right inside his own house.
Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.
Mr. Speaker, our Nation must no longer be complacent about underage drinking and its alarming consequences. We must bring this national public health crisis out of the shadow and into the bright light of a national priority.
All sounds are sharper in winter; the air transmits better. At night I hear more distinctly the steady roar of the North Mountain. In summer it is a sort of complacent purr, as the breezes stroke down its sides; but in winter always the same low, sullen growl.
Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
Now I have a third must-do on my list of things to do with cancer, and it's this: follow your gut, ask questions, don't be complacent.
Christianity is not the faith of the complacent, the comfortable or of the timid. It demands and creates heroic souls like Wesley, Wilberforce, Bonhoeffer, John Paul the Second, and Billy Graham. Each showed, in their own way, the relentless and powerful influence of the message of Jesus Christ.
Because life is short. I feel we’re made of a hunger, a desire for life – if that can be described as a material. As I get older, I’m trying to open that channel more. If you don’t, if you close off desire and get complacent, life loses its freshness and sweetness, and that’s what I crave. That’s my bliss.
We insist on being Someone, with a capital S. We get security from defining ourselves as worthless or worthy, superior or inferior. We waste precious time exaggerating or romanticizing or belittling ourselves with a complacent surety that yes, that’s who we are. We mistake the openness of our being—the inherent wonder and surprise of each moment—for a solid, irrefutable self. Because of this misunderstanding, we suffer.
Creative people rarely need to be motivated-they have their own inner drive that refuses to be bored. They refuse to be complacent. They live on the edge, which is precisely what is needed to be successful and remain successful.
...and when I am negative, I will be negative only for as long as I have to be, until I can understand it, and then I will be positive...when I hate, I will turn my hatred into energy, when I am angry I will turn my anger into energy...and I will not be complacent.
To fall for," "to be fallen for"--I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an impression of fatuousness. It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar "What a messy business it is to be fallen for" by the more literary "What uneasiness lies in being loved.
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind.
With the persistence of tensions and conflicts in various parts of the world, the international community must never forget what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as a warning and in incentive to develop truly effective and peaceful means of settling tensions and disputes. Fifty years after the Second World War, the leaders of nations cannot become complacent but rather should renew their commitment to disarmament and to the banishment of all nuclear weapons.
My mother has all my awards, because if I walked downstairs every day and saw all my achievements it would be so easy to become complacent.
There's been a lot of comparisons to "The Prisoner," and sometimes people take a negative tact on that, but to be really honest, I count that as a compliment, in the sense that what I felt "The Prisoner" was for the '60's, in how the individual triumphs over the state and authority, our show is really about how complacent we have become in our lives, which are scrutinized.
Any time you add something to your game, you still have to find ways to improve, so I'm still studying the game and trying to find out ways to increase how we use me on the floor. You're not being complacent, not falling back and floating around the perimeter too much, figuring out when to attack. I'm trying to find that balance between attacking and spotting up and things like that.
The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.
Voltaire remarked that it is possible to kill a flock of sheep by witchcraft if you give them plenty of arsenic at the same time. The sheep, in this figure, may well stand for the complacent apologists of capitalism; Marx's penetrating insight and bitter hatred of oppression supply the arsenic, while the labour theory of value provides the incantations.
We are not being arrogant or complacent when we are said that our country, as a united nation, has never in its entire history, enjoyed such a confluence of encouraging possibilities.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it' is the slogan of the complacent, the arrogant or the scared. It's an excuse for inaction, a call to non-arms.
The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians-when they are somber and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths.
Science, the largest religion of the twentieth century, had become tarnished by images of exploding space shuttles, crack babies, and a generation of complacent Americans who allowed the television to raise their children. People were looking for something - I think they just didn't know what. And even though they were once again starting to open their eyes to the world of magic and the arcane that had been with them all the while, they still thought I must be some kind of joke.
We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent.
The great danger in today's world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience. Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor.
Success lulls you. It makes the most ambitious of us complacent and sloppy. In a way, you have to cultivate a kind of amnesia and forget all of your previous prosperity.
Young women from a very young age are taught that life will be easier if you can just turn on the charming smile and say very little and be complacent and docile and sweet.
There was a transition going on - Baghdad being the intellectual capital of the world where major advances were made in agriculture and mathematics and engineering and medicine and astronomy, and then that all sort of collapsed. And I was trying to understand how such a intellectually fertile environment can lose its compass bearing. Because I think about the creative centers today - countries, or even regions. Will Silicon Valley always be as innovative? Will the United States be innovative, or will we become complacent?
Just because you can watch half-nude women on afternoon television or gay men kissing on the streets of nearly any major city does not mean America is free, as complacent liberals might think, much less too free, as conservatives often suggest. Just because most dissidents are left alone doesn't mean there is no police state, for that would be convenient indeed for the police statists: the idea that people ought not complain so long as they have the right to do so.
I think that overall, ultimately the impact of advertisers calling the shots is a more cloying, complacent culture. For example, it was just announced that Unilever is branding environmental content at The Guardian. How radical or pointed can that content be?
As days lengthen into weeks and months and even years of adversity, the hurt grows deeper. The Church cannot hope to save a man on Sunday if during the week it is a complacent witness to the crucifixion of his soul.
It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals--though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt--but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I--in complacent adjustment to alien demands.
People find themselves in ruts all the time. You're in a complacent lifestyle where you work 9 to 5 and then you add a mortgage and kids. You feel trapped, but guess what, brother? You constructed that life. If you're OK with it, there's nothing wrong with that. But if you've got unease, then you've got to make a change.
It's useful for activists just to be out there to keep you mindful and not get complacent, even if ultimately you think some of their criticism is misguided.
When I got into the business of entertainment, I did it for a reason. I didn't do it to not be successful. I did it to be successful. And to hopefully get to the highest level that I possibly could. Thus far, I'm achieving those goals. That doesn't make you stop. That doesn't make you complacent. It makes you want to do more.
The public, too, has to make an effort in order to understand the writer who, though he renounce complacent obscurity, cannot always express his new-hidden thoughts lucidly and according to accepted models.
Genuine trust involves allowing another to matter and have an impact in our lives. For that reason, many who hate and do battle with God trust Him more deeply than those whose complacent faith permits an abstract and motionless stance before Him. Those who trust God most are those whose faith permits them to risk wrestling with Him over the deepest questions of life. Good hearts are captured in a divine wrestling match; fearful, doubting hearts stay clear of the mat.