Passivity Quotes - Page 4

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

  Noam Chomsky

  May, Easy, Honorable

  Noam Chomsky (2015). “Because We Say So”, p.67, City Lights Books

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• I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for this void which contemplates. To all that which you are, and, for our language, are not, I add a consciousness. I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship, I name you and define you. You become a delicious passivity.

  Maurice Blanchot

  Mirrors, Light, Offering

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• People go to the movies instead of moving. Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them.

  Tennessee Williams

  Moving, Adventure, Character

  Tennessee Williams (1996). “The Glass Menagerie”, p.47, Heinemann

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• 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

  Life Is, Excuse, Intention

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• Acceptance is not a state of passivity or inaction. We are not saying you can't change the world, right wrongs or replace evil with good. Acceptance is, in fact, the first step to successful action. If you don't fully accept a situation precisely the way it is, you will have difficulty changing it.

  Peter McWilliams

  Inspirational, Change, Acceptance

  "Life 101: everything we wish we had learned about life in school -- but didn't".

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• I have no idea of submitting tamely to injustice inflicted either on me or on the slave. I will oppose it with all the moral powers with which I am endowed. I am no advocate of passivity.

  Lucretia Mott

  Ideas, Justice, Atheism

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• When you're a trans woman, you are made to walk this very fine line, where if you act feminine you are accused of being a parody, but if you act masculine, it is seen as a sign of your true male identity. And if you act sweet and demure, you're accused of reinforcing patriarchal ideals of female passivity, but if you stand up for your own rights and make your voice heard, then you are dismissed as wielding male privilege and entitlement.

  Julia Serano

  Sweet, Rights, Voice

  Julia Serano (2013). “Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive”, p.20, Seal Press

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• Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying.

  Russell Jacoby

  Past, Thinking, Space

  "Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing". Book by Russell Jacoby, 1975.

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• We cannot withdraw our cards from the game. Were we as silent and mute as stones, our very passivity would be an act.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Life, Games, Would Be

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• 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

  Regret, Passivity Is, Should Have

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• Every public space is like a billboard, with messages from the collective subconscious of the nation. There one can read passivity, rage indifference, fear, double standards, subversion, bad economy, a twisted definition of 'public' itself, the whole Weltanschauung - an entire range of emotions and attitudes is exposed.

  Slavenka Drakulic

  Attitude, Space, Double Standard

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• The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity. Receptivity is the artist's holding him or herself alive and open to hear what being may speak.

  Rollo May

  Confused, Artist, Listening

  Rollo May (1994). “The Courage to Create”, p.80, W. W. Norton & Company

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• 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

  Weakness, Doing You, Belief

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

  Charles R. Swindoll

  Christian, Believe, Enemy

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• Across all Cinderella versions it was clear that the 21st century was not very much in evidence, particularly in the character of Cinderella so it seemed, it felt actually as though it hadn't been done for quite some time, not with the kind of lushness that we could do it with, with an absolute removal of the passivity of Cinderella and finding an amusing way, a lighthearted but significant way of making her proactive and not a girl who's life is about waiting for a bloke.

  Kenneth Branagh

  Girl, Character, Waiting

  "Kenneth Branagh Talks Updating 'Cinderella' and Working With Disney". Interview with Kara Warner, screenrant.com. March 12, 2015.

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• 1) Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of différance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition) production of the intervals without which the "full" terms would not signify, would not function.

  Jacques Derrida

  Mean, Play, Differences

  "Positions" by Jacques Derrida, University of Chicago Press, (p. 21), 1982.

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• Think about every time you've seen someone being objectified, abused, enslaved. We see it constantly on the TV, in magazines, on the Internet. We've become numb, so we do nothing. The accumulation of passivity might make reading about that exploitation uncomfortable. And sometimes when I'm writing, I think of it like this: "People seem to like garbage, so here is what garbage smells like..."

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

  "Go Forth (Vol. 36)". Interview with Brandon Hobson, logger.believermag.com. August 25, 2015.

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• Some observers compare elections in some countries with sports events, where people are but spectators. Moreover, elections must not be mere interludes for pushing a lever and then retreating to passivity, for democracy demands committed participation in the daily workings of society.

  Alfred-Maurice de Zayas

  Sports, Country, People

  "Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order". August 07, 2013.

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

  Jessica Valenti

  Sex, Morality, Ideology

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• In between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.

  Howard Zinn

  War, Possibility, Thousand

  Howard Zinn (2012). “The Historic Unfulfilled Promise”, p.228, City Lights Publishers

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• Technology teaches passivity. Absorbed in our devices - at any age - we are absorbed in someone elses perspective.

  Julia Cameron

  Technology, Perspective, Age

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• he very word "patient" implies passivity and powerlessness. Me-teacher-you-dumbbell, or me-doctor-you-patient, or me-politician-you-voter, or any other paternalistic or maternalistic stay-in-your-place tradition will not pass muster with me.

  Andrew Saul

  Teacher, Doctors, Voters

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• The state has no religion for the simple reason that it has each and everyone.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Simple, Religion, Reason

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• We spoke of ourselves as "emancipated" when we got the vote. Yet we are still slaves to the superficial and the superfluous. We are concerned with the length of our skirts, with the latest lipstick, with the newest thrill in hats. We are impressed by advertisements that insist we must be alluring; we must adopt a time-consuming coiffure, we must spend hours with the "beautician," we must attend fashion shows. As long as women are preoccupied with nonessentials we shall be afflicted with infantilism, passivity, and the eventual disillusionment that results from trivial, unproductive lives.

  Mary Barnett Gilson

  Fashion, Long, Thrill

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• Why is it that nobody cries out, nobody spits in their faces, nobody jumps at their throats? We doff our caps to the S.S. men returning from the little wood; if our name is called out we obediently go with them to die, and we do nothing. We starve, we are drenched by rain, we are torn from our families. What is this mystery? This strange power of one man over another? This insane passivity that cannot be overcome? Our only strength is our great number; the gas chambers cannot accommodate all of us.

  Tadeusz Borowski

  Rain, Men, Names

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