Passivity Is Quotes

#1. You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Ian McEwan

#2. Escape is the byword - forwards, backwards, or sideways - into alcohol, busyness, good works, passivity, fantasy, or even madness. For the reality of the present and the immediate future seem even more frightening today

Peter Marshall

#3. Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity

Guy Debord

#4. What eleven- to thirteen-year-old boys fear is passivity of any kind. When they do act passively we can be fairly certain that it is an act of aggression designed to torment a parent or teacher ... Mischief at best, violence at worst is the boy's proclamation of masculinity.

Louise J. Kaplan

#5. One is responsible for one's own life. Passivity provides no protection.

Madeleine M. Kunin

#6. Passivity is the same as defending injustice.

Deepak Chopra

#7. Emotion, which is called a passivity of the soul, is a confused idea, whereby the mind affirms concerning its body, or any part thereof, a force for existence (existendi vis) greater or less than before, and by the presence of which the mind is determined to think of one thing rather than another.

Baruch Spinoza

#8. Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug.

Caroline Knapp

#9. This magical thinking, this idea that human and personal progress is somehow inevitable, leads to political passivity. ... It has turned whole nations, such as the United States, into self-consuming machines of death.

Chris Hedges

#10. The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one's self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity; each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other.

Simone De Beauvoir

#11. Nothing remains intact without effort. Repetition of formulas does not assure the transmission of thought. It is not safe to entrust a doctrinal treasure to the passivity of memory. Intelligence must play a part in its conservation, rediscovering it, so to speak, in the process.

Henri De Lubac

#12. It is passivity that dulls feeling.

Susan Sontag

#13. If something possesses no capacity for activity whatever, it is nothing; it may be wholly penetrated, but it cannot be touched. Therefore passivity and reaction are everywhere equal.

Wilhelm Von Humboldt

#14. The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum ...

Noam Chomsky

#15. The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action.

Herbert Schiller

#16. Between an uncontrolled escalation and passivity, there is a demanding road of responsibility that we must follow.

Dominique De Villepin

#17. The peace of God is not the peace of stoicism or passivity. It is the most intense activity.

Oswald Chambers

#18. It is in vain for man to endeavor to instruct man in those things which the Holy Spirit alone can teach.

Pere La Combe

#19. Passivity is really a crappy substitute for manhood. But it's as common as facial hair on a hipster, or salmon-breath on a grizzly bear.

Josh Hatcher

#20. There is a heady sense of manhood that comes from advancing from apathy to commitment, from timidity to courage, from passivity to aggressiveness. There is an intoxication that comes from standing up to the police at last.

David T. Dellinger

#21. The conventional mind is passive - it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The dimensional mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.

Robert Greene

#22. Passivity is fatal to us. Our goal is to make the enemy passive.

Mao Zedong

#23. He enjoys the passivity of sitting in a classroom again, listening to an instructor, being told what to do. He is reminded of being a student, of a time when his father was still alive.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#24. Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.

Eric Hoffer

#25. mine is an ongoing subsection more passive than any passivity.

Erin Moure

#26. Life has been thrown into the world, light into darkness, the soul into the body. It expresses the original violence done to me in making me be where I am and what I am, the passivity of my choice-less emergence into an existing world which I did not make and whose law is not mine

Hans Jonas

#27. Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity, in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.

Aldous Huxley

#28. The sooner our society admits that the Negro Revolution is no momentary outburst soon to subside into placid passivity, the easier the future will be for us all.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#29. Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even love itself. And how much we enjoy it. Our happiest moments are spent trying to think up new varieties of victimhood ...

J.G. Ballard

#30. This is a fine chance to let go, to "win my life by losing it," which means not recklessness but acceptance, not passivity but nonattachment.

Peter Matthiessen

#31. Hollywood is McWorld's storyteller, and it inculcates secularism, passivity, consumerism, vicariousness, impulse buying, and an accelerated pace of life, not as a result of its overt themes and explicit story lines but by virtue of what Hollywood is and how its products are consumed.

Benjamin R. Barber

#32. Male passivity is a disease that robs a man of his purpose while it destroys marriages, ruins families, and spoils legacies. A passive man doesn't engage; he retreats. He neglects personal responsibility. At its core, passivity is cowardice.

Dennis Rainey

#33. Captivating the spirit of the age is a matter of great talent; being swept away by it characterizes an average mind. The two are as different from one another as activity and passivity.

Franz Grillparzer

#34. To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.

Virginia Woolf

#35. Prostitution is said to be the world's oldest profession . It is, indeed, a model of all professional work: the worker relinquishes control over himself ... in exchange for money. Because of the passivity it entails, this is a difficult and, for many, a distasteful role.

Thomas Szasz

#36. It is all too easy as an artist to allow the shape of our career to be dictated to us by others. We can so easily wait to be chosen. Such passivity invites despair. To remain healthy and vital, artists must stay proactive in their own behalf.

Julia Cameron

#37. Television is a passivity.

John Green

#38. Mediocrity is the companion of passivity and will not heed the call of great things. Courage is the companion of sacrifice and cannot help but heed the call of great things. And we are left of our own accord to choose one or the other.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#39. Will is based on activity, whim on passivity.

Erich Fromm

#40. [U]ntil feminists work to empower femininity and pry it away from the insipid, inferior meanings that plague it - weakness, helplessness, fragility, passivity, frivolity, and artificiality - those meanings will continue to haunt every person who is female and/or feminine.

Julia Serano

#41. The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.

W. H. Auden

#42. Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death - it's something that happens to you and those around you.

Paul Kalanithi

#43. Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.

Dorothy Thompson

#44. Nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#45. Though the passivity of woman's role weighs on me, suffocates me. Rather than wait for his pleasure, I would like to take it, to run wild. Is it that which pushes me into lesbianism? [...] Do women act thus?

Anais Nin

#46. What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being.

Wendell Berry

#47. Nobody is going to save you but yourself and the 'best' and only way to do so is
through action.

Oli Anderson

#48. Passivity is the dragon every woman has to murder in her quest for independence.

Jill Johnston

#49. The path of peace is not a passive journey. It takes incredible strength not to open a can of 'whoop-ass', justifiably, when ones button is pushed.

T.F. Hodge

#50. The longer I live the more I believe that the greatest enemy of a victorious Christian life is passivity.

Charles R. Swindoll

#51. Would have. Could have. Should have. This is the language of condemnation underscored by the passivity of regret. It's a dead language. The thing is, you can't un-sin. You can only repent.

Steven Furtick

#52. Any belief system that is based on fear, encourages weakness, sanctions intolerance threatens vengeance, promotes passivity and requires you to relinquish your personal power is doing you a disservice.

Walt F.J. Goodridge

#53. Acceptance is not passivity. It is a courageous step in the process of transformation.

Jack Kornfield

#54. Spirituality promotes passivity when the domain of spirit is defined as outside the world. When this world is the terrain of spirit, we ourselves become actors in the story, and this world becomes the realm in which the sacred must be honored and freedom created.

Starhawk

#55. Passivity may be the easy course, but it is hardly the honorable one.

Noam Chomsky

#56. Well, there was a sort of bastard justice in his view of the case, and so I dropped the matter. When you can't cure a disaster by argument, what is the use to argue?

Mark Twain

#57. As soon as one is conscious of the presence of the Master, one must, in all passivity, abandon the work to Him.

Thomas Merton

#58. [Virginity is] a cultural ideology that conflates passivity - the act of not having sex - with superior morality.

Jessica Valenti

#59. The particular sin of omission which gives ground to the evil spirits is the believer's passivity.

Watchman Nee

#60. A producer is a saboteur who tries to infiltrate the passivity of viewers and to create impressions that are lasting.

Bill Moyers

#61. It's not okay for a woman to be in control of her own body, her own reproductive system, much less of her life. There's opposition even to that. So passivity is rewarded as feminine.

Gloria Steinem

#62. A patient's passivity must not be unilaterally interpreted as lack of motivation, resistance, lack of confidence, or the like. Many times, passivity is a function of inadequate knowledge and/or skills.

Marsha M. Linehan

#63. Pessimism is a primary source of passivity,

Barbara W. Tuchman

#64. Of all the judgments you make in life, none is as important as the one you make about yourself. The difference between low self-esteem and high self-esteem is the difference between passivity and action, between failure and success.

Nathaniel Branden

#65. We know that God is not mean to people who are afraid; the Scripture is full of examples of his compassion. But he will not enable passivity. The "wicked and lazy" servant was passive. He did not try. God's grace covers failure, but it cannot make up for passivity. We have to do our part.

Henry Cloud

#66. The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.

Slavoj Zizek

#67. Free institutions certainly exist, but a tradition of passivity and conformism restricts their use - a cynic might say that this is why they continue to exist.

Noam Chomsky

#68. Bullies may be the perpetrators of evil, but it is the evil of passivity of all those who know what is happening and never intervene that perpetuates such abuse.

Philip Zimbardo

#69. Appealing to emotions, immediate gratification, and passivity of the American public is enabling a sicker society.

Melissa Cady

#70. Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination, where as you can watch a film-and even enjoy it-in a state of mindless passivity.

Paul Auster

#71. The problem that will doubtless interest future historians is not so much the presence, in the twentieth century, of mass political alienation, but the passivity with which the citizenry accepted that condition. It may well become known as the century of sophisticated deference.

Lawrence Goodwyn

#72. Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving ... conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.

John Dewey

#73. The essential thing is learning how not to be absent from one's own life.

Marty Rubin

#74. Anarchy is like custard cooking over a flame; it has to be constantly stirred or it sticks and gets heavy, like government.

Tom Robbins

#75. Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature.

Camille Paglia

#76. Nothing happens without intention, Willem. Nothing. This theory of yours - life is rules by accidents - isn't that just one huge excuse for passivity?

Gayle Forman