Passive People Quotes & Sayings

One is not loved accidentally; one's own power to love produces love - just as being interested makes one interesting. People are concerned with the question of whether they are attractive while they forget that the essence of attractiveness is their own capacity to love. To love a person productively implies to care and to feel responsible for his life, not only for his physical existence but for the growth and development of all his human powers. To love productively is incompatible with being passive, with being an onlooker at the loved person's life; it implies labor and care and the responsibility for his growth. — Erich Fromm

People who feel the need to push and control tend to keep their feelings bottled up. As a result, they get shut down or remote, and their feelings come out in twisted, unhealthy ways. They become irritable, passive-aggressive, or volatile, for example. — Judith Orloff

Just see the difference - in the ancient days, people used to "fall in love." Now people "make love." You see the difference? Falling in love is being overwhelmed by love; it is passive. Making love is almost profane, almost destroying its beauty. It is active, as if you are doing something; you are manipulating and controlling. Now people have changed the language - rather than using "falling in love" they use "making love. — Osho

A lot of the things that involve power on the highest levels sometimes involve the darker side of human psychology. People can be very passive aggressive or they can be aggressive and they can conceal their intentions. There's this world that exists that nobody writes about or describes it's like a dirty little secret or taboo. — Robert Greene

These scientific studies countervail the influential claims of the Kants, Nietzsches, and Rands about the nature of human goodness. Compassion is not a blind emotions that catapults people pell-mell toward the next warm body that walks by. Instead, compassion is exquisitely attuned to harm and vulnerability in others. Compassion does not render people tearful idlers, moral weaklings, or passive onlookers but individuals who will take on the pain of others, even when given the chance to skip out on such difficult action or in anonymous conditions. The kindness, sacrifice, and jen that make up healthy communities are rooted in a bundle of nerves that has been producing caretaking behavior for over 100 million years of mammalian evolution. — Dacher Keltner

Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. — Saul Alinsky

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

This must be changed, if only in America's own interest. The last war has shown that there are no longer any barriers between the continents and that the destinies of all countries are closely interwoven. The people of this country must realize that they have a great responsibility in the sphere of international politics. The part of passive spectator is unworthy of this country and is bound in the end to lead to disaster all round. — Albert Einstein

I wasn't cute or passive enough to be "femme," and I wasn't mean or tough enough to be "butch." I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community. — Audre Lorde

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes 'sight-seeing.' — Daniel J. Boorstin

I've met a few people who were passive-aggressive, but I've never met anyone who was aggressive-passive. I don't want tacos! Maybe. — Demetri Martin

I was invited to visit a friend who was very sick ... When I came to him, he said to me, "Henri, here I am lying in this bed, and I don't even know how to think about being sick. My whole way of thinking about myself is in terms of action, in terms of doing things for people. My life is valuable because I've been able to do many things for many people. And suddenly, here I am, passive, and I can't do anything anymore."
As we talked I realized that he and many others were constantly thinking, "How much can I still do?" Somehow this man had learned to think about himself as a man who was worth only what he was doing. And so when he got sick, his hope seemed to rest on the idea that he might get better and return to what he had been doing. If the spirit of this man was dependent on how much he would still be able to do, what did I have to say to him? — Henri J.M. Nouwen

With no notice to the American people ... this country entered the war ... Stranger than the fact was the passive acceptance of it. — Garet Garrett

People around me like me the best when I'm depressed because I'm a bit more passive. — Halsey

Reformers should aim at delivering men from the temptations of sloth no less than from the temptations of ambition, avarice and the lust for power and position. Conversely, no reform which leaves the masses of the people wallowing in the slothful irresponsibility of passive obedience to authority can be counted as genuine change for the better. — Aldous Huxley

The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether - very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of radio, but for the moment reading remained most people's principal method for filling idle time. — Bill Bryson

I believe we are a species with amnesia, I think we have forgotten our roots and our origins. I think we are quite lost in many ways. And we live in a society that invests huge amounts of money and vast quantities of energy in ensuring that we all stay lost. A society that invests in creating unconsciousness, which invests in keeping people asleep so that we are just passive consumers or products and not really asking any of the questions. — Graham Hancock

You're always feeling powerless in life. If you're in an abusive relationship or working for what we call a psychotic boss sometimes the only option is to leave because you're emotions get so entangled with these manipulative people that staying there you're just helpless because they're good at passive aggressive games and you're not, so you have to leave. — Robert Greene

Fruit of passive-aggressive people. These people resist demands by indirect tactics. They will not take responsibility for their own choices; instead, they turn around and blame someone else for making them do it. Or they will agree to do things that they don't really want to do, and then gripe about the person behind her back. — Henry Cloud

I realize I love crazy ladies. Of course I don't like to think of myself as one, but maybe I am, too. I dunno. I'm always drawn to them; I think it's because I'm attracted to people who aren't in the business of people-pleasing: saying what they really think, not passive-aggressive at all. — Michaela Watkins

Experience was something it was difficult to avoid, though many people had managed to keep it to a minimum. — Philip Jose Farmer

As an actor, it's a relatively passive job unless you're generating your own content or writing your own content. So to a certain degree you're at the mercy of what is available, what you're reading, what you become passionate about, and ultimately, what people want to hire you for. — Elijah Wood

I'm against suppression of pornography. If you suppress guns - yes; if you want to suppress poverty - yes. These are the obscenities, the real brutalization of people. I am almost more outraged by ads for blue jeans or cars that sort of blatantly depict women not only as sex objects, but women that look younger than the age of consent, looking like they've just been raped or asking to be raped-utterly passive sex objects. — Betty Friedan

Most people have a style in the workplace that overshoots in one direction - too aggressive or too passive, too talkative or too shy. In that first deal, I said too much. This was not a shock to anyone who knows me. Once I identified this weakness, I sought help to correct it. I turned to Maureen Taylor, a communications coach, who gave me an assignment. She told me that for one week I couldn't give my opinion unless asked. It was one of the longest weeks of my life. — Sheryl Sandberg

I find a danger in watching films. It is like passive dreaming. It requires no participation, no effort. It induces passivity. It is baby food; no need to masticate, no need to carve. There is no need to learn to play an instrument, to learn to read a book. People stretch on specially inclined chairs and receive the images in utter, infantile passivity. Speech, already inadequate in America, will soon disappear together with the ability to derive significance from the printed world. This is as radical a change as from monkey to man, it is an evolution from man into automaton. — Anais Nin

At its core, black theology is predicated on the assertion that God has a unique relationship with African Americans. God is not a passive bystander in human history but rather an active participant in the struggles of oppressed and dispossessed people. — Melissa V. Harris-Perry

As I have defined it, love is the antithesis of laziness. Ordinary laziness is a passive failure to love. Some ordinarily lazy people may not lift a finger to extend themselves unless they are compelled to do so. Their being is a manifestation of nonlove; still, they are not evil. — M. Scott Peck

I encourage people not to be passive consumers of music and of culture in general. And feeling like, yeah, you can enjoy the products of professionals, but that doesn't mean you don't have to completely give up the reins and give up every connection to music or whatever it happens to be. — David Byrne

Society doesn't officially recognize friendship as an institution in the way it recognizes sexual relationships, so there's no real protocol for ending one. If you've been going out, dating, or just sleeping with someone for even a month or two an you want to stop seeing him, you're expected to have a conversation with him letting him know it and giving him some bogus explanation. This conversation is seldom pleasant, and it ranges in tone from brittle adult adult discussions in coffee shops to armed standoffs in day care centers, but once it's over, you at least know your status.

Because there's no formal etiquette for ending a friendship, most people do it in the laziest, most passive and painless way possible, by unilaterally dropping any effort to sustain it and letting the other person figure it out for themselves. — Tim Kreider

Being popular doesn't always win spiritual change. Christ didn't pour out the coins of the moneychangers and overturn their tables with any degree of manners when he cleansed the temple. His harshness drew a point - to make people realize how much better they could become. — Shannon L. Alder

People should be more passive with what they consider trustworthy. — Ariel Pink

Sadly, I have met very few people who have a plan for their life. Most are passive spectators, watching their lives unfold, one day at a time. They are reactive rather than proactive. They may plan their careers, the building of a new home, or even a vacation. But it never occurs to them to plan their life. — Michael Hyatt

Mechanized warfare still left room for human qualities to play an important part in the issue. 'Automatic warfare' cancels them out, except in a passive form. Archidamus is at last being justified. Courage, skill and patriotism become shrinking assets. The most virile nation might not be able to withstand another, inferior to it in all natural qualities, if the latter had some decisively superior technical appliance.
(...)The advent of 'automatic warfare' should make plain the absurdity of warfare as a means of deciding nations' claims to superiority. It blows away romantic vapourings about the heroic virtues of war, utilized by aggressive and ambitious leaders to generate a military spirit among their people. They can no longer claim that war is any test of a people's fitness, or even of its national strength. Science has undermined the foundations of nationalism, at the very time when the spirit of nationalism is most rampant. — B.H. Liddell Hart

He comes out of the mine about the same as when he went in. He has no sense that it was something he decided to do himself, or that he had a choice. He's like totally passive. But I think in real life people are like that. It's not so easy to make choices on your own. — Haruki Murakami

If you turn a blind eye to the world now, history will turn a blind eye to you later. Ignoring an issue makes you a tacit supporter of it. — Stewart Stafford

Look, the United States doesn't have political parties. In other countries, take say Europe, you can be an active member of the political party. Here, the only thing in a political party is gearing to elections, not the other things you do. So it's basically, a way of making people passive, submissive objects. — Noam Chomsky

When you're in a competitive environment, always give out the impression that you don't care. It makes people want you more. If you act desperate, it's over. I think a passive attitude is helpful. It comes naturally because I'm lazy. — Diablo Cody

Thinking was torment; why not give up thinking, and drift and dream? But the misery of the world, she thought, forces me to think. Or was that a pose? Was she not seeing herself in the becoming attitude of one who points to his bleeding heart? to whom the miseries of the world are misery, when in fact, she thought, I do not love my kind. Again she saw the ruby-splashed pavement, and faces mobbed at the door of a picture palace; apathetic, passive faces; the faces of people drugged by cheap pleasures; who had not even the courage to be themselves, but must dress up, imitate, pretend. — Virginia Woolf

Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them, what we call "education," they're going to take control - "they" being what Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the people. — Noam Chomsky

The more one engages in conscious action to understand and transform the world -- one's reality -- through the interplay between reflection and action, the more fully human we become, that is, we have greater control over our destinies. If we just accept the world as set by others, we allow ourselves to become dehumanized -- an object shaped and made by others rather than expressing our uniquely human potential to be involved actively in creating what we become. As human beings, our shared vocation is to become active individual subjects engaged on an equal basis with others in the process of creating (or naming) the world. We should create history and culture rather than exist merely as passive objects accepting reality and the world as ready-made by other people. In creating history and culture, we create our own beings in the process. — Marie Emmit

And it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff
no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people
one colossal turkey feeds all. A moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the cross and the crucifixion of the Christians, when everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more passive about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the year. A moratorium on all the grievances and resentments, and not only for the Dwyers and the Levovs but for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone else. It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours. — Philip Roth

I may have spent long enough in your orbit to have absorbed your ferocious conviction that a happy family cannot be a mere myth or that even if it is, better to die trying for the fine if unattainable than sulking in passive, cynical resignation that hell is other people you're related to. — Lionel Shriver

I always love to put hidden messages in my music videos, because I know there are people like me who, when they watch something, are really active, involved participants. I'm not usually a really passive listener or observer. So I do put those messages in there for people who spend a great deal of time [looking for them]. — Jared Leto

The definition of patience I use for myself is: Patience does nothing. Patience is the front end of these three fruits which relate to people - patience, goodness an kindness - and it is the passive part of love: It is love doing nothing...
Doing nothing gives you and me time (even a second!) to do something - to pray, to reflect, and to plan to respond in a righteous manner.
~Elizabeth George in her book A Woman's Walk with God. — Melissa B. Kruger

I used to love the saying, 'If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.' It sounds great, right?

The only problem is that, as it turns out, it's not even remotely true.
Worse yet, it encourages people to passively wait for someone else to give them a break. Most people who do that will grow old waiting for someone to come along and recognize their genius. — John Hawkins

Be fueled by the opportunities of today. Do not be passive in your life. Be courageous in driving forward in this journey of life. I know people will try to push you back. I know life will challenge you to find refuge in the past. I know the present induces fear. Do not be fooled into backwards living. Be courageous enough to keep moving forward. — Steve Maraboli

I discourage passive skepticism, which is the armchair variety where people sit back and criticize without ever subjecting their theories or themselves to real field testing. — Tim Ferriss

If all Church power vests in the clergy, then the people are practically bound to passive obedience in all matters of faith and practice; for all right of private judgment is then denied. — Charles Hodge

As Robert Bly laments in Iron John, Some women want a passive man if they want a man at all; the church wants a tamed man - they are called priests; the university wants a domesticated man - they are called tenure-track people; the corporation wants a ... sanitized, hairless, shallow man. — John Eldredge

This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people's convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that 'they' will never allow him to do this, that, and the other. Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union. I was told immediately that 'they' would never allow it. Who were 'they'? I asked. Nobody seemed to know, but evidently 'they' were omnipotent. — George Orwell

A part of a healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are NOT strengthening her prosocial sense, you are damaging it
and the first person she will stop protecting is herself. — Martha Stout

Although watching TV is far from being a positive experience - generally people report feeling passive, weak, rather irritable, and sad when doing it - at least the flickering screen brings a certain amount of order to consciousness. The predictable plots, familiar characters, and even the redundant commercials provide a reassuring pattern of stimulation. The screen invites attention to itself as a manageable, restricted aspect of the environment. While interacting with television, the mind is protected from personal worries. The information passing across the screen keeps unpleasant concerns out of the mind. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Sometimes it feels like you and I are at the movie theater, sitting next to each other and watching the same movie. People say something, argue incessantly, even fight, but this is all somewhere far away, on the other side of the screen, and we are just passive onlookers unable to affect the course of events. — Igor Eliseev

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture. Nota bene.
It tells you.
You don't tell it. — Joan Didion

Understanding evil as the absence of Light does not require you to become passive, or to disregard evil actions or evil behavior. If you see a child being abused, or a people being oppressed, for example, it is appropriate that you do what you can to protect the child, or to aid the people, but if there is not compassion in your heart also for those who abuse and oppress - for those who have no compassion - do you not become like them? Compassion is being moved to and by acts of the heart, to and by the energy of love. — Gary Zukav

Except that stopping midsentence is the worst thing people can do. It's like, totally passive-aggressive, because you can't take issue with anything they've said. You have to take issue with what you think they were going to say. Which then they deny. — Sophie Kinsella

I don't understand why people enjoy different things than I do, so I'm going to make a passive aggressive comment about it. — Anonymous

Peacemaking contains all the elements of the Christian faith. Peacemaking is the result of not only taking the beatitudes seriously, but living them. It involves right relationships. Right relationships with God, right relationships with God's people and right relationships with God's creation. It involves love. Proper love of self, love of God and creation, and love of all people - even our enemies. It is not passive, it is active; it is peacemaking not peacekeeping. Above all, it is following the way of Jesus, which was the way of the cross, where his power was 'made perfect in weakness' (2 Cor. 12:9). — Donald R. Clymer

Feedback for leaders is often nuanced and difficult to deliver. That said, hearing you are passive-aggressive from 10 different people described 10 different ways becomes hard to ignore. — Scott Weiss

Next, take a look at the quality of the people who surround you. Do these people back you emotionally, or not? If they don't back you, are they at least passive? If not, get rid of them. Sometimes it is hard to drop off your mates at the great bus stop of life. But remember, your energy will only rise in direct relationship to the number of things you are able to get rid of - not to the things you acquire. By getting rid of things, attitudes, encumbrances, and blocks of one kind or another, things fly. — Stuart Wilde

Adolescent girls discover that it is impossible to be both feminine and adult. Psychologist I. K. Broverman's now classic study documents this impossibility. Male and female participants in the study checked off adjectives describing the characteristics of healthy men, healthy women and healthy adults. The results showed that while people describe healthy men and healthy adults as having the same qualities, they describe healthy women as having quite different qualities than healthy adults. For example, healthy women were described as passive, dependent and illogical, while healthy adults were active, independent and logical. In fact, it was impossible to score as both a healthy adult and a healthy woman. — Mary Pipher

Most people are passive aggressive in this world. I have the idea that the human being is born with a kind of reservoir of aggression. We are inherently somewhat aggressive creatures and we either channel that in direct ways or we channel it in indirect ways and become passive aggressive. — Robert Greene

Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything. — Fulton J. Sheen

I am truly an angel investor and I'am not a passive investor.As a passive investor, I am awful because I can not put funding into a company and leave it to other people. — Terry Matthews

One of the nice things about books as opposed to television and movies to some extent is it's not a passive entertainment. People really do get involved, and they do create, and they do have their own visions of what different characters look like and what should happen. It's great - it means their brains are working. — James Patterson

She says that the problem with passive people is that they force you to take action. After that, they hate you for it. They never forgive you. — Chuck Palahniuk

There are moments in a creative life when you understand why you do it. Those moments might last a few seconds or maybe, for some people, years. But whatever the actual time that passes, they still feel like a single moment. Fragile in the way a moment is, liable to be shattered by a breath, set apart from all the other passing time, distinct.
But then it changes. And what seemed unimaginably exhilarating gets bogged down, even when a project is going well. It is a gradual, inevitable sobering during which your right to be passive diminishes. What the ether has given you, now in fact belongs to you. And then it is work. Then it is hard. — Robin Black

Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn't care to sit next to in a train, people that don't exist, places you've never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader's creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive. — Ben Okri

In the course of aesthetic experience, the perceiver may be overwhelmed by this 'mere object', overcome with emotion, altered to the very roots of his being.[ ... ] The experience of beauty involves an exchange of power, and as such, it is often disorienting, a mix of humility and exaltation, subjugation and liberation, awe and mystified pleasure.[ ... ] Many people, fearing a pleasure they cannot control, have vilified beauty as a siren or a whore. Since at one time or another though, everyone answers to 'her' call, it would be well if we could recognize the meaning of our succumbing as a valuable response, an opportunity for self-revelation rather than defeat.[ ... ] It entails a flexibility and empathy toward 'Others' in general and the capacity to see ourselves as both active and passive without fearing that we will be diminished in the process. — Wendy Steiner

My life is good because I am not passive about it. I invest in what is real. Like real people, to do real things, for the real me. — Gwyneth Paltrow

The challenge to shifting perspective can be broken down into two general categories. The first relates to passive ignorance - people are not aware that they even have a perspective and that others might see things differently. The second relates to active indifference or resistance - we don't care that the other side may see things differently; we only want to see things our own way. — Donny Ebenstein

People are unhappy because they don't understand life; by happy, I mean complete, aware, conscious, poignant, caring, loving, unaffected, cosmic, simplistic, humble, excited, passive - everything. You are everything. — Frederick Lenz

Nell's husband has short-man syndrome. Eddie is one of those deadly dull people who is so upbeat that I suspect he would subconsciously like to go through the neighborhood, house by house, with a machine gun. He seems oblivious to the effect that his long, rambling monologues have on people - he doesn't notice the blank faces, the fingers flexing like those of people buried alive, the ocular tics. You could write down his words verbatim, show them to him, and he'd probably say, 'I know someone just like that!' Then he'd tell you about that person until your teeth hurt. His hostage-taking is passive-aggressive. — Anne Lamott

For me, family means the silent treatment. At any given moment, someone is always not speaking to someone else.'
Really,' I said.
We're passive-aggressive people,' she explained, taking a sip of her coffee. 'Silence is our weapon of choice. Right now, for instance, I'm not speaking to two of my sisters and one brother ... At mine [my house], silence is golden. And common.'
To me,' Reggie said, picking up a bottle of Vitamin A and moving it thoughtfully from one hand to the other, 'family is, like, the wellspring of human energy. The place where all life begins.' ...
Harriet considered this as she took a sip of coffee. 'Huh,' she said. 'I guess when someone else does something worse. Then you need people on your side, so you make up with one person, jsut as you're getting pissed off at another.'
So it's an endless cycle,' I said.
I guess.' She took another sip. 'Coming together, falling apart. Isn't that what families are all about? — Sarah Dessen

Patience is not passive resignation, nor is it failing to act because of our fears. Patience means active waiting and enduring. It means staying with something and doing all that we can - working, hoping, and exercising faith; bearing hardship with fortitude, even when the desires of our hearts are delayed. patience is not simply enduring; it is enduring well!
Impatience, on the other hand, is a symptom of selfishness. It is a trait of the self-absorbed. It arises from the all too-prevalent condition called "center of the universe" syndrome, which leads people to believe that the world revolves around them and that all others are just supporting cast in the grand theater of mortality in which only they have the starring role. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

You can't write novels about people who are timid, risk-averse and passive. Or you can, but they're called literary novels. — Ken Follett

Active people make lots of mistakes, and wise ones grow from them (Hebrews 5:14). They try something, experience a limit, and adapt. They experience the depth of God's forgiveness because they do things for which they need to be forgiven. Passive people have trouble learning because they are afraid to take risks. Because of this, they also have a harder time taking charge of their lives and boundaries. God is not pleased with those who "shrink back" in passivity (Hebrews 10:38). He wants his people to participate in life with him, not wait on the sidelines. — Henry Cloud

I am impressed and distressed at how passive hierarchical organizations make people. There's often a lot of overt activity, but it's not going anywhere, it's game-playing. It's play-acting at work. — Judith M Bardwick

I have always found it odd that people who think passive aggressively ignoring a person is making a point to them. The only point it makes to anyone is your inability to articulate your point of view because deep down you know you can't win. It's better to assert yourself and tell the person you are moving on without them and why, rather than leave a lasting impression of cowardness on your part in a person's mind by avoiding them. — Shannon L. Alder

Society expects man to be a passive social animal who believes like the People of the Field in "Jurgen" that "to do what you always have done" and "what is expected of you" are the twin rules of life. This, is course, is not true. The wanton crucifixion of impulses, the unnecessary blocking and frustration of the drives and urges, are an evil that reflects itself in sophistication, ennui and boredom, dissatisfaction, melancholy, fatigue, anxiety and neurosis. — Abraham Myerson

I've made so many people angry that they kind of blur into one unpleasant memory of people staring at you with somewhere between passive aggression and active aggression. — John Oliver

There are many other escapes from the empirical, external self, which might seem to be, but are not, contemplation. For instance, the experience of being seized and taken out of oneself by collective enthusiasm, in a totalitarian parade: the self-righteous upsurge of party loyalty that blots out conscience and absolves every criminal tendency in the name of Class, Nation, Party, Race or Sect.. Yet it is precisely these ersatz forms of enthusiasm that are "opium" for the people, deadening their awareness of their deepest and most personal needs, alienating them from their true selves, putting conscience and personality to sleep and turning free, reasonable men into passive instruments of the power politician. — Thomas Merton

During the 1960s, large groups of people who are normally passive and apathetic began to try to enter the political arena to press their demands.? The naive might call that democracy, but that's because they don't understand. The sophisticated understand that that's the crisis of democracy. — Noam Chomsky

I'm sure my children will be artists. I hope they will direct because it is much more interesting. Acting is great, and I love it, but it is very passive, and it depends on other people's desire, and you depend on others all the time. — Emmanuelle Seigner

Modern consumer life is a form of extreme passive violence against all people. — Bryant McGill

Francis Spufford, using very contemporary idiom, calls for the same thing in this way. When discussing our sinfulness, he says: What we're talking about here is not just our tendency to lurch and stumble and screw up by accident, our passive role as agents of entropy. It's our active inclination to break stuff, "stuff" here including . . . promises, relationships we care about and our own well-being and other people's. . . . [You are] a being whose wants make no sense, don't harmonize: whose desires deep down are discordantly arranged, so that you truly want to possess and you truly want not to at the very same time. You're equipped, you realize, more for farce (or even tragedy) than happy endings. . . . You're human, and that's where we live; that's our normal experience.180 Until we fully acknowledge the chaos within us that the Bible calls sin, we live in what Calvin calls "unreality. — Timothy J. Keller

She said, "What would you do if you left?" "I'm not sure. Get a doctorate maybe. I know some people who work in think tanks. I'd want to talk to them. Sound them out." She gave him a sour look. The term made her unhappy - think tank - and he didn't blame her. Passive, mild, middle-aged, ivory-towerish. People rustling papers in redoubts of social strategy. Situation reports, policy alternatives, statistical surveys. He — Don DeLillo

[ ... ] without much ardor but quite unmistakably, she was writhing her hips as if she were dancing. When he was very close, he saw' her gaping mouth: she was yawning lengthily, insatiably: the great open hole was rocking gently atop die mechanically dancing body. Jean-Marc thought: she's dancing and she's bored.
He reached the seawall: down below, on the beach, he saw men with their heads thrown back releasing kites into the air. They were doing it with passion, and Jean-Marc recalled his old theory: there are three kinds of boredom: passive boredom: the girl dancing and yawning; active boredom: kite-lovers; and rebellious boredom: young people burning cars and smashing shop windows. — Milan Kundera

We no longer sing and dance. We don't know how to. Instead, we watch other people sing and dance on the television screen. Christmas, which was once a festival of active enjoyment, has turned into a binge of purely passive pleasures. — Tom Hodgkinson

I'd rather have the market tell us what - I'd rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive people in Washington. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Most of the people in a war never fight for even a minute though they bear for years and die forever. They do not fight, but only starve, only suffer, only die: the sum of all this passive misery is that great activity, War. — Randall Jarrell

I've always believed it right for young people to drink. Not to be alcoholic of course, that is a passive state of being, not a positive action. But it is good to drink to excess. — Stephen Fry

Americans cannot escape a certain responsibility for what is done in our name around the world. In a democracy, even one as corrupted as ours, ultimate authority rests with the people. We empower the government with our votes, finance it with our taxes, bolster it with our silent acquiescence. If we are passive in the face of America's official actions overseas, we in effect endorse them. — Mark Hertsgaard

Discouragement does not come to passive and indifferent people who lack initiative — Sunday Adelaja

You're wrong, you know," Susan said. "She doesn't belong here. I'm against the death penalty. I don't think the state should be in the business of killing people. I think it's wrong. And it's hypocritical. Mostly, I just think it's mean. Gretchen Lowell ? She is the exception. She deserves to die. If we kill one person, one criminal in the history of the world, it should be her." Susan paused, reconsidering. "And Hitler. Her, and Hitler". Prescott had that shrink look on his face again, passive and unimpressed, and yet somehow judgmental at the same time. Susan continued. "She removed a detective's spleen without anesthesia. She stuck a wire through an old woman's eyeball and then threaded it behind her nose and out through the other eye socket and then she stuck the wire into an outlet."
Prescott raised an eyebrow. "And you're arguing that she's sane? — Chelsea Cain

I was raised in Duluth, Minnesota, where you never say that you're cold, or that you're suffering, and you listen politely to people, even if you disagree with them completely. Then you say passive-aggressive things later. — Maria Bamford

Q: Is it still possible nowadays to influence the world by songs? To be political by means of messages?
A: No, there are newspapers for that. When people want to deal with the world, they should watch television.
Q: That's very passive.
A: The world has become like that. People are going to the football stadium, they don't play themselves anymore.
Q: Did you ever think you could be politically active through your songs?
A: No, no, no. If I had wanted to do that, I would have gone to Harvard or Yale, would have studied and would have a become a politician after that. — Bob Dylan

In a tough situation, don't avoid acting just because it's easier or comfortable. Don't lapse into a passive state. People who give up, die. — Gregory Benford

People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state
it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle ... Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.
Source: The Wisdom of Heschel — Abraham Joshua Heschel

We have thought of peace as passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences ... From War to Peace is not from the strenuous to the easy existence; it is from the futile to the effective, from the stagnant to the active, from the destructive to the creative way of life ... The world will be regenerated by the people who rise above these passive ways and heroically seek, by whatever hardship, by whatever toil, the methods by which people can agree. — Mary Parker Follett