A scale is only in balance for a brief second. Inevitably the pendulum swings. It's impossible to maintain.
During the first World War women in the United States had a chance to try their capacities in wider fields of executive leadershipin industry. Must we always wait for war to give us opportunity? And must the pendulum always swing back in the busy world of work and workers during times of peace?
Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
From that moment the pendulum went into reverse
In terms of our democracy, we are sort of shrugging our shoulders and saying, oh dear, Guantánamo, that's so awful, that's so awful, but it's here. The pendulum usually swings from left to right and then right to left, but there are so many people in power who have taken the pendulum and just pinned it to the right that there is a fear that it's never going to swing back.
We're waiting for the pendulum to swing back again, which I am absolutely confident it will.
The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
If the pendulum swings, it may swing to a combination of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats and, thus, to a period of minority government or coalition, in some form.
Science gains from it [the pendulum] more than one can expect. With its huge dimensions, the apparatus presents qualities that one would try in vain to communicate by constructing it on a small [scale], no matter how carefully. Already the regularity of its motion promises the most conclusive results. One collects numbers that, compared with the predictions of theory, permit one to appreciate how far the true pendulum approximates or differs from the abstract system called 'the simple pendulum'.
Your history is animal. Your future is divinity. Right now, you are like a pendulum, swinging between the two.
I think now we're seeing the pendulum switch back to this idea where conversations are more important, if not more important than documents.
I felt as if I were riding a pendulum. Just as I would swing into the abyss of hopelessness, the pendulum would swing back with some small goodness.
The pendulum of mathematics swings back and forth towards abstraction and away from it with a timing that remains to be estimated.
We are now vibrating between too much and too little government, and the pendulum will rest finally in the middle.
Maybe children just want whatever it is they don't get. And then they grow up and give their children what they wanted, be it silence or information, affection or independence--so that child, in turn, craves something else. With every generation the pendulum swings from opposite to opposite, stillness and peace so elusive.
Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.
It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.
Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion.
The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.
Our advanced and fashionable thinkers are, naturally, out on a wide swing of the pendulum, away from the previous swing of the pendulum. . . . They seem to have an un-argue-out-able position, as is the manner of sophists, but this is no guarantee that they are right.
