Fly-Wheel

Habit is the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what ... saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor .... It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive [jobs] from being deserted. It holds the miner in his darkness. It keeps different social strata from mixing.

--William James, "Principles of Psychology" (1890)

Quoted in John Taylor Gatto, "Weapons Of Mass Instruction", p. 173