Inaction Quotes - Page 8

• The real test is not whether you avoid failure, because you won't. It's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it. . .

  Barack Obama

  Patience, Perseverance, Real

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• Action is about living fully. Inaction is the way that we deny life. Inaction is sitting in front of the television every day for years becuase you are afraid to be alive and to take the risk of expressing what you are. Expressing what you are is taking action.

  Miguel Angel Ruiz

  Motivational, Years, Risk

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• For us to ignore by inaction the slaughter of American civilians and American soldiers, whether in nightclubs or airline terminals, is simply not in the American tradition. Self-defense is not only our right, it is our duty.

  Ronald Reagan

  Self, Soldier, Defense

  Ronald Reagan (2004). “Speaking My Mind: Selected Speeches”, p.288, Simon and Schuster

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• We have to remind ourselves that we are not the transitory body, we are not the person who is having experiences, we are not affected by action or inaction.

  Frederick Lenz

  Yoga, Body, Action

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• Contentment is never the outcome of fulfillment, of achievement, or of the possession of things; it is not born of action or inaction. It comes with the fullness of what is, not in the alteration of it.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Achievement, Contentment, Outcomes

  Jiddu Krishnamurti (2010). “Commentaries on Living”, p.250, M-y books ltd

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• If an economy in the doldrums could drift indefinitely, the price of government inaction might be graver by far than the consequences of bold unorthodoxy.

  Robert Heilbroner

  Government, Might, Economy

  Robert L. Heilbroner (1986). “The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers”

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• Cynicism does not cause inaction.

  David Wong

  Doe, Causes, Cynicism

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• A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

  Isaac Asimov

  Robots, May, Harm

  'I, Robot' (1950) in 'Runaround'

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• Lacan , Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction.

  Camille Paglia

  Self, Perfect, Personality

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Camille Paglia, "Arion", Third Series, Volume 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.

  Benjamin Cardozo

  Choices

  "Richard v. Credit Suisse, 242 N.Y. 346, 351". 1926.

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• I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

  Ted Hughes

  Dream, Sleep, Eye

  Ted Hughes (2014). “A Ted Hughes Bestiary: Selected Poems”, p.25, Faber & Faber

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• And then God gave me insight: this was winter. It would end, in time, but not by my own doing. My responsibility was simply to know the season, and match my actions and inactions to it. It was to learn the slow hard discipline of waiting. It was my season to believe in spite of-to believe in the absence of evidence or emotion, when there's nothing, no bud, no color, no light, no birdsong, to validate belief. It was my time to walk without sight.

  Mark Buchanan

  Believe, Responsibility, Winter

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• Man works for an object. Remove that object and you reduce him into inaction.

  Jose Rizal

  Men, Remove, Objects

  "Indolence of the Filipino". La Solidaridad, 1890.

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• Slobodan Miloševi?, more than anyone else, caused a division within the Left and Centre Left, dividing the pacifists, anti-imperialists and anti-Americans from the anti-fascists and the internationalists. He reminded too many of us that inaction can be as toxic and murderous as action. He prepared us - for weal or woe - for the new world.

  Slobodan Milosević

  World, Woe, Toxic

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• The actions and inactions of hundreds of millions of people and nearly 200 states, will affect what kind of world emerges in the time ahead.

  Herbert Schiller

  People, World, Action

  "Living In The Number One Country". Book by Herbert Schiller, 2000.

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• It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There's a certain boldness to inaction.

  Karen Thompson Walker

  Bravery, Kind, Certain

  Karen Thompson Walker (2012). “The Age of Miracles: A Novel”, p.78, Random House

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• I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism- in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle.

  H. L. Mencken

  Life, Success, Powerful

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• There are always consequences to actions that you take. There are consequences to inaction. And thinking through, asking the questions, "Well, then what happens? What comes next?" is critically important.

  Chuck Hagel

  Thinking, Important, Asking

  Interview with Steve Inskeep, www.npr.org. January 26, 2015.

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• Indifference and inaction must always pay a penalty.

  William Feather

  Pay, Indifference, Penalties

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• No, one couldn't make a revolution, one couldn't even start a riot, with sheep that asked only for better browsing.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Sheep, Revolution, Status Quo

  Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (1938). “Works”

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• But my belief is growing that our political and social evils are remediable, if only all of us who want a change for the better just get up and work for it, all the time, with as much knowledge and intelligence as we can muster for it. Half the wrongs of human life exist because of the inertia of people who simply will not use their energies in fighting for what they believe in. And finally the wrongs roll up into world catastrophes and millions of deaths and a terrible set-back for all mankind.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Believe, Fighting, People

  Katherine Anne Porter, Isabel Bayley (1994). “Letters of Katherine Anne Porter”, p.291, Atlantic Monthly Press

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• Nothing wilts faster than a laurel rested upon.

  Mary Kay Ash

  Laurels, Faster

  Mary Kay Ash (1995). “Mary Kay, You Can Have it All: Lifetime Wisdom from America's Foremost Woman Entrepreneur”, Prima Lifestyles

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• If you know but do not do, you are a very unhappy person indeed.

  Peace Pilgrim

  Unhappy Person, Persons, Knows

  Peace Pilgrim (1992). “Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words”, p.41, Friends of Peace PIlgrim

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• the touchstone of a free act - from the decision to get out of bed in the morning or take a walk in the afternoon to the highest resolutions by which we bind ourselves for the future - is always that we know that we could also have left undone what we actually did.

  Hannah Arendt

  Morning, Freedom, Decision

  Hannah Arendt (1978). “Willing”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• the most dangerous temptations are not due to the active, sudden flames of desire, 'the lusts of the flesh,' but to the disinclinations of the flesh, its indolence and sluggishness, our tendency to become creatures of habit.

  Sigrid Undset

  Flames, Temptation, Lust

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