Quotes about passive
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“Any intervention now would be a triumph for Germany! A military triumph! A war triumph! Intervention would have been for us a military disaster. Has the Secretary of State for War no right to express an opinion upon a thing which would be a military disaster? That is what I did, and I do not withdraw a single syllable. It was essential. I could tell the hon. Member how timely it was. I can tell the hon. Member it was not merely the expression of my own opinion, but the expression of the opinion of the Cabinet, of the War Committee, and of our military advisers. It was the opinion of every ally. I can understand men who conscientiously object to all wars. I can understand men who say you will never redeem humanity except by passive endurance of every evil. I can understand men, even—although I do not appreciate the strength of their arguments—who say they do not approve of this particular war. That is not my view, but I can understand it, and it requires courage to say so. But what I cannot understand, what I cannot appreciate, what I cannot respect, is when men preface their speeches by saying they believe in the war, they believe in its origin, they believe in its objects and its cause, and during the time the enemy were in the ascendant never said a word about peace; but the moment our gallant troops are climbing through endurance and suffering up the path of ascendancy begin to howl with the enemy.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1916/oct/11/statement-by-prime-minister in the House of Commons (11 October 1916) Secretary of State for War

Men, War, Peace, Courage

“Male tumescence is an assertion of the separateness of objects. An erection is architectural, sky-pointing. Female tumescence, through blood or water, is slow, gravitational, amorphous. In the war for human identity, male tumescence is an instrument, female tumescence an obstruction. The fatty female body is a sponge. At peak menstrual and natal moments, it is locked passively in place, suffering wave after wave of Dionysian power.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 91

War, Suffering, Water

“The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1950s, The Mechanical Bride (1951), p. 21

People, Music, Sense, Effort

“I never had a strategy in my dealing with other humans! I've always been very passive socially. I went along with their agenda. I had none of my own! Left to my own devices I stayed in my room or wandered aimlessly in the streets, fantasizing about bizarre things I yearned to do to big ladies, or filled with self-pity and resentment. I was helpless in the presence of other people! My main concern was to make them like me by being as agreeable as possible, and secondly to impress them with my brilliance, my sharp wit, my originality, and my fundamental saintliness. Over time, and after years—decades—of diligent practice, I became very good at this cute little performance of mine. But this performance was improvised in the moment, catered to suit whoever I happened to be with. There was no strategy. It was always an effort. Only in solitude was I completely relaxed. Funny thing…”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

From his sketchbook (16 February 1998), reproduced in The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 380

People, Solitude, Effort, Time

“At the point at which the concept of différance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its "living speech," in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)- become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of différance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to différance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called above the "transcendental signified.”

Jacques Derrida book Positions

Source: Positions (1982), p. 29

Intelligence

“[Henry] James’s repressions and evasions are many, varied and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredding James novels in their hands, I cannot say. I used to wonder whether enthusiasm for him was based on identification, since his passive, tentative heroes resemble many academics. Perhaps what is intolerable is his enshrinement in a soporific criticism. So much must be overlooked to crown him with laurel.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 622

People

“The female has learned by long experience to win by losing, to wield power in the passive-aggressive manner of the sadomasochist.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 115

Learning

“Gravitation is not only similar to inertia in its generality, it is also measured by the same number… the mass. The inertial mass is what Newton calls the "quantity of matter": it is a measure for the resistance offered by a body to a force trying to alter its state of motion. It might be called the "passive mass." The gravitational mass, on the other hand, is a measure of the force exerted by the body in attracting other bodies. We might call it the "active" mass. The equality of active and passive, or gravitational and inertial, mass was in Newton's system a most remarkable accidental co-incidence, something like a miracle. Newton himself decidedly felt it as such, and made experiments to verify it, by swinging a pendulum with a hollow bob which could be filled with different materials. The force acting on the pendulum is proportional to its gravitational mass, the inertia to its inertial mass: the period of its swing thus depends on the ratio between these two masses. The fact that the period is always the same therefore proves that the gravitational and inertial masses are equal.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Dependency

“As we strive to teach others we must have the humility to acknowledge that we too still have much to learn. And we must have the flexibility to adapt to the changing needs of the world around us. Women who have been taught that modesty and pliancy are among the prized virtues of our gender are marvellously equipped for the learning process. But they must be given the opportunity to turn these often merely passive virtues into positive assets for the society in which they live.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

Opening Keynote Address at NGO Forum on Women, Beijing China (1995)

Women, World, Learning, Change

“Unless there is an obvious reason to do otherwise, most of use passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame-bound rather than reality-bound.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Chapter 34, "Frames and reality", page 367 (ISBN 9780141033570).

Problem, Reality, Decision

“Physics, chemistry, astrophysics are obviously the ideal field for the tidy mind …in the biological and geological sciences the tidy mind often goes astray and the passive, unmathematical approach may me more suitable.
…The sciences that deal with natural process, geology or geography, or with life, zoology or botany, have an immensely more complicated task than physics or chemistry.
… A particular danger, I believe, lies in an oversimplified use of mathematical or statistical methods of investigation, in which obviously erroneous results may be obtained by a selection of only a few of many relevant factors to be considered.”

Claud William Wright (1917–2010) British paleontologist

From "Order and Disorder in Nature", 1958 Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, 69, 2, 77-82.

Life, Mathematics, Nature, Science

“… "folk art" signifies the poetical, musical, and pictorial activities of those strata of the population which are uneducated and not urbanized or industrialized. It is of the essence of this art that those who keep it in being are not only passively receptive, but normally are creative participants in the artistic activities, and yet do not stand out as individuals or claim any personal authorship of the productions. "Popular art" on the other hand is to be understood as artistic or quasi-artistic production for the demand of a half-educated public, generally urban and inclined to mass-behavior. In folk art, producers and consumers are hardly distinguished, and the boundary between them is always fluid; in the case of popular art, we find on the contrary an artistically uncreative, completely passive public, and professional production of artistic goods strictly in response to the demand for them. It is indeed a striking fact that folk art, especially folk-poetry, emerges from the ranks of those who enjoy it, whereas popular songs—the street-ballads and popular "hits"—derive from professionals belonging to and spiritually dependent upon the upper classes.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Arnold Hauser (1985). The philosophy of art history. p. 279

Education, Art, Music, Behavior

“Our failure to discern a universal good does not record any lack of insight or ingenuity, but merely demonstrates that nature contains no moral messages framed in human terms. Morality is a subject for philosophers, theologians, students of the humanities, indeed for all thinking people. The answers will not be read passively from nature; they do not, and cannot, arise from the data of science. The factual state of the world does not teach us how we, with our powers for good and evil, should alter or preserve it in the most ethical manner.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Nonmoral Nature", pp. 42–43
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

People, World, Failure, Nature

“Every morning, at the balcony, after establishing a conscious contact with each of those who are present, I identify myself with the Supreme Lord and merge myself completely in Him. Then my body, completely passive, is nothing but a channel through which the Lord passes freely His forces and pours on all His Light, His Consciousness and His Joy, according to each one's receptivity.”

The Mother (1878–1973) spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo

In "The Formation Of The Ashram", and also in [ The Mother: The Story of Her Life by Georges Van Vrekhem ( 2004) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=8hgG8aweqncC&pg=RA1-PT134&lpg=RA1-PT134, p. 134

Light, Joy

“Present action, though futile, is preferable to passive acceptance of such a fate as awaits us.”

Michael Shea (1946–2014) writer

Source: A Quest for Simbilis (1974), Chapter 6, “The House on the River” (p. 112)

Fate

“Perhaps the single most valuable contribution of feminism has been the way it has chipped away at men's fantasies about women. Today it is the destructive woman, consciously or unconsciously intent on controlling, manipulating and exploiting men, who feeds on his regressive, pathetic desire to see himself as the dominant superman. … This hostile attitude was well expressed by one woman who responded with the following comment to a survey on attitudes and experiences regarding the roles of men and women in our society. She wrote:"[If men learn that women are superior] we'll be stuck with a lot of sniveling little boys clinging to our skirts. It's better to let them think they're king of the castle, lean and depend on them, and continue to control and manipulate them as we always have."A man is in jeopardy if he fails to realize that the "fragile," "passive" women of today is not "feminine" but repressed, and may well emerge as the angry woman of tomorrow who will turn the tables on him at a time when he may hardly be prepared or equipped to adapt to the changes. Such is the price of refusing to recognize what is.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

He and His Changes, pp. 188–189
The New Male (1979)

Women, Men, Hostility, Way

“The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.”

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) American linguist

Whorf (1937) "Grammer categories" in: Language, (1945) Vol 21. p. 1-11.

Nature

“Slave-owning culture … gives rise to the teleological explanation of the Universe, which reaches its subtlest form in Plato’s or Aristotle’s philosophies, in which all phenomena are determined by Ideas or Forms. These correspond to the plans formed in the mind of the slave-owner which his slave passively fulfils.”

Christopher Caudwell (1907–1937) British Marxist literary critic, journalist and writer

Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949), Chapter IV: Consciousness: A Study in Bourgeois Psychology

Idea, Universe

“Power, for those without the means of commanding others, is frustration. The existence of power-to as power-over means that the vast majority of doers are converted into the done-to, their activity transformed into passivity, their subjectivity into objectivity.”

John Holloway book Change the World Without Taking Power

Change the World Without Taking Power (2002)

“[T]he word "eternal" must by him be taken to stand for what "temporal" does not and cannot stand for; namely, the unchangeable Ground presupposed by the changing temporal; the necessary as against the contingent; the independent as against the dependent; the primary as against the derivative; the self-existent as against that which exists in and through it; the genuine cause, the causa sui, as against that which is after all nothing but effect, however it may be tied, by the causa sui, in an unrupturable chain of antecedent and consequent. Or we may say it means the noumenon as against the phenomenon; or, in fine, the thing in itself as against the thing in other. That is, the relation between the eternal and the temporal is not, and cannot be, only another case of the temporal relation. The relation is just one of pure reason, and is, in fact, sui generis: the eternal does not precede the temporal by date, but only in logic; it is the sine qua non without which the temporal cannot exist, nor is even conceivable. In brief, throughout my book I mean by the "eternal" simply the Real as contrasted with the apparent; the world of self-active causes as contrasted with the world of derivative effects, in so far passive.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix D: Reply to a Review in the New York Tribune, p.412-3

Books, World, Change, Dependency

“The idea that a pupil is a passive recipient, a container waiting to be filled by the teacher's knowledge and instruction - all this is nonsense. Teaching is a living relationship, of give and take, of mutual learning.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Violinist Yehudi Menuhin

Idea, Knowledge, Learning, Teachers

“As to the allegation of the Communist that religion makes men passive, we have only to observe that the dynamic power of religious convictions is precisely what prevents a soundly religious person from accepting Communist oppression and Communist mandates. A person practicing the teachings of the Judaic-Christian philosophy will not lie or steal on command. He will not shed innocent blood. He will not participate in the diabolical Communist practice of genocide - the systematic extermination of entire nations or classes. It is clearly evident from the numerous Communist writings that what they fear in religion is not that it makes religious people passive to the dominant class but that it prevents them from becoming passive to Communist discipline. Deep spiritual convictions stand like a wall of resistance to challenge the teachings and practices of Communism. Furthermore, the Communist sees in the dynamic ideology of Judaic-Christian teachings a force for peace which cuts through the vitals of Communism's campaign for world-wide revolution.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Men, People, Lie, World

“Spectator sports make people more passive, because you're not doing them—you're watching somebody doing them.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

"Sports" in How the World Works, p. 168
Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994, Secrets, Lies and Democracy, 1994

People, Sport

“African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 44

“My position on date rape is partly based on my study of The Faerie Queen, as detailed in a full chapter in Sexual Personae: in 1590, the poet Edmund Spencer already sees that passive, drippy, naive women constantly get themselves into rape scenarios, while talented, intelligent, alert women, his warrior heroines, spot trouble coming and boldly trounce their male assailants. My feminism stresses courage, independence, self-reliance, and pride.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 304

Women, Intelligence, Courage, Study

“The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavours to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Essay on the Principle of Population (1798; rev. through 1826)

Men, Truth, Idea, Thinking

“A dangerous form of psychological splitting had to have taken place, and it continues to take place, in the psyches of many African Americans who can on one hand oppose racism, and then on the other hand passively absorb ways of thinking about beauty that are rooted in white supremacist thought.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Rock My Soul (2003)

Beauty, Way, Thinking

“A whole dimension of human activity and passivity has been de-eroticized. The environment from which the individual could obtain pleasure—which he could cathect as gratifying almost as an extended zone of the body—has been rigidly reduced. Consequently, the “universe” of libidinous cathexis is likewise reduced. The effect is a localization and contraction of libido, the reduction of erotic to sexual experience and satisfaction.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 73

Pleasure, Universe

“People state that the World is marching towards a prescribed goal laid down by the Creator, which means that no matter how brilliant the achievements of man may be, he can exert no influence whatever on the final result. No doubt man is a puny and insignificant creature in contrast with God, but If I were just to play a passive part like the animals, there would be no justification in endowing him with a free will and creating him to the image and likeness of His Creator. He could have been a Superior Animal only.”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Planning for a Better World

God, People, World, Animals

“Surrealism in its first period offered specific methods for approaching the images of concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusively passive and receptive role of the surrealist subject, are now [1935] in liquidation and giving place to new surrealist methods of systematic exploration of the irrational.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', p. 13

“…media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Nicholas Carr (1959) American writer

Is Google Making us Stupid in The Atlantic, July 2008.

Way, Guy, Sea

“To avoid this error, the error of assuming that that to be widely read and to be well read are the same thing, we must consider a certain distinction in types of learning. … In the history of education, men have often distinguished between learning by instruction and learning by discovery. … Discovery stands to instruction as learning without a teacher stands to learning through the help of one. In both cases the activity of learning goes on in the one who learns. It would be a mistake to suppose that discovery is active learning, and instruction passive. There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading. This is so true, in fact, that a better way to make the distinction clear is to call instruction “aided discovery.””

Mortimer J. Adler book How to Read a Book

Source: How to Read a Book (1940, 1972), p. 11-12

Men, Education, Way, Error

“From the invention of the cotton-gin slavery became a progressive system — not passively tolerated as in process of extinction, but actively striving for development and extension. It became a conscious political power. It made no offensive professions. It still deprecated itself as an evil, so difficult to deal with, and, with an adroit allusion to Ham and Onesimus, it smoothed the ecclesiastical conscience of the country and only asked to be let alone. And it was let alone. The War of 1812, and the consequent commercial confusion and renewed devotion to trade, held the country torpid upon the subject. If anybody looked at slavery inquisitively, it folded its hands demurely upon its breast and said, 'I am such a dreadful thing! How unfortunate that I should exist! What can be done with me? Just please to let me alone, that is all I want. A leper, you see; a miserable leper!”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

War, Evil, Country

“All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.”

John Twelve Hawks American writer

Fourth Realm Trilogy (2005-2009), The Traveler (2005)

People

“The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 267

Imagination

“Both the law of inertia and the law of gravitation contain a numerical factor or a constant belonging to matter, which is called mass. We have thus two definitions of mass; one by the law of inertia: mass is the ratio between force and acceleration. We may call the mass thus defined the inertial or passive mass, as it is a measure of the resistance offered by matter to a force acting on it. The second is defined by the law of gravitation, and might be called the gravitational or active mass, being a measure of the force exerted by one material body on another. The fact that these two constants or coefficients are the same is, in Newton's system, to be considered as a most remarkable accidental coincidence and was decidedly felt as such by Newton himself. He made experiments to determine the equality of the two masses by swinging a pendulum, of which the bob was hollow and could be filled up with different materials. The force acting on the pendulum is proportional to its active mass, its inertia is proportional to its passive mass, so that the period will depend on the ratio of the passive and the active mass. Consequently the fact that the period of all these different pendulums was the same, proves that this ratio is a constant, and can be made equal to unity by a suitable choice of units, i. e., the inertial and the gravitational mass are the same. These experiments have been repeated in the nineteenth century by Bessel, and in our own times by Eötvös and Zeeman, and the identity of the inertial and the gravitational mass is one of the best ascertained empirical facts in physics-perhaps the best. It follows that the so-called fictitious forces introduced by a motion of the body of reference, such as a rotation, are indistinguishable from real forces…. In Einstein's general theory of relativity there is also no formal theoretical difference, as there was in Newton's system…. the equality of inertial and gravitational mass is no longer an accidental coincidence, but a necessity.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

p, 125
"The Astronomical Aspect of the Theory of Relativity" (1933)

Law, Time, Dependency

“I assume that cells, before their conversion into completely passive or "formed material," throw off minute granules or atoms, which circulate freely throughout the system, and when supplied with proper nutriment multiply by self-division, subsequently becoming developed into cells like those from which they were derived. These granules for the sake of distinctness may be called … gemmules. They are supposed to be transmitted from the parents to the offspring, and are generally developed in the generation which immediately succeeds, but are often transmitted in a dormant state during many generations and are then developed. Their development is supposed to depend on their union with other partially developed cells or gemmules which precede them in the regular course of growth. … Lastly, I assume that the gemmules in their dormant state have a mutual affinity for each other, leading to their aggregation either into buds or into the sexual elements. … These assumptions constitute the provisional hypothesis which I have called Pangenesis.”

Charles Darwin book The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication

volume II, chapter XXVII: "Provisional Hypothesis of Pangenesis", page 374 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=389&itemID=F877.2&viewtype=image It is sometimes claimed that modern biologist are dogmatic "Darwinists" who uncritically accept all of Darwin's ideas. This is false: No one today accepts Darwin's hypothesis of gemmules and pangenesis. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868)

Parent, Dependency

“Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable — not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.… You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent — you learn, in a word, femininity.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon book Only Words

Source: Only Words (1993), pp. 3-7

Pain, Imagination, Literature, Suffering

“Monotheism introduced the idea that we should passively accept whatever fate God dealt. Gambling seemed to be a refusal to do that.”

Aaron C. Brown (1956) American financial analyst

Source: The Poker Face of Wall Street (2006), Chapter 4, A Brief History of Risk Denial, p. 75

God, Fate, Idea

“Individuals who participate in interaction rituals are filled with emotional energy, in proportion to the intensity of the interaction. Durkheim called this energy “moral force,” the flow of enthusiasm that allows individuals in the throes of ritual participation to carry out heroic acts of fervor or self-sacrifice. I would emphasize another result of group-generated emotional energy: it charges up individuals like an electric battery, giving them a corresponding degree of enthusiasm toward ritually created symbolic goals when they are out of the presence of the group. Much of what we consider individual personality consists of the extent to which persons carry the energy of intense interaction rituals; at the high end, such persons are charismatic; a little less intensely, they are forceful leaders and the stars of sociability; modest charges of emotional energy make passive individuals; and those whose interaction ritual participation is meager and unsuccessful are withdrawn and depressed.”

Randall Collins (1941) American sociologist

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), p. 23

Star, Personality

“I don't believe it's possible to be neutral. The world is already moving in certain directions, and to be neutral, to be passive in a situation like that, is to collaborate with whatever is going on. And I, as a teacher, do not want to be a collaborator with whatever is happening in the world. I want myself, as a teacher, and I want you, as students, to intercede with whatever is happening in the world.”

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) author and historian

Howard Zinn: You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004) documentary film

World, Teachers

“The passive strength of materials of all kinds has been very fully investigated, and many new conclusions have been formed respecting it, which are of immediate importance to the architect and to the engineer, and which appear to contradict the results of some very elaborate calculations.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Preface
A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807)

Appearance

“There’d been studies over the years supporting the proposition that groups composed exclusively of women usually made intelligent decisions, that exclusively male groups did a bit less well, and that mixed groups did most poorly of all, by a substantial margin. It appeared that, when women were present, testosterone got the upper hand and men took greater risks than they might otherwise. Correspondingly, women in the mixed group tended to revert to roles, becoming more passive, and going along with whatever misjudgment the males might perpetrate.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Chindi (2002), Chapter 24 (p. 335)

Women, Men, Intelligence, Support

“The systems advocated by professed upholders of laissez-faire are in reality permeated with coercive restrictions of individual freedom…. What is the government doing when it “protects a property right”? Passively, it is abstaining from interference with the owner when he deals with the thing owned; actively, it is forcing the non-owner to desist from handling it, unless the owner consents. Yet Mr. Carver would have it that the government is merely preventing the non-owner from using force against the owner. This explanation is obviously at variance with the facts—for the non-owner is forbidden to handle the owner's property even where his handling of it involves no violence or force whatever…. In protecting property the government is doing something quite apart from merely keeping the peace. It is exerting coercion wherever that is necessary to protect each owner, not merely from violence, but also from peaceful infringement of his sole right to enjoy the thing owned.”

Robert Lee Hale (1884–1969) American lawyer and economist

“Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-Coercive State,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Sep., 1923), pp. 470-494

Peace, Reality, Freedom

“The top of modern American society is increasingly unified and often seems wilfully co-ordinated: at the top there has emerged an elite of power. The middle levels are a drifting set of stalemated balancing forces: the middle does not link the bottom with the top. The bottom of this society is fragmented, and even as a passive fact, increasingly powerless:at the bottom there is emerging a mass society.”

C. Wright Mills book The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

“The status quo was rote memorization and recitation in classrooms thronged with passive children who were sternly disciplined when they expressed individual needs.”

David Guterson (1956) Novelist, short story writer, poet, journalist, and essayist

Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense (1992), Ch. 5: "School, Home, and History", p. 109

Children

“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 (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 1

Wisdom, Thinking, Time, Past

“… the stupefying effect spectator sports have in making people passive, atomized, obedient nonparticipants—nonquestioning, easily controlled and easily disciplined”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

"Sports" in How the World Works, p. 169
Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994, Secrets, Lies and Democracy, 1994

People, Sport

“Because if you want me to "act professional", I can tell you that I'm not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what "acting professionally" results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

<nowiki>Re: [ 00/19 http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=137392506516022&w=2, 3.10.1-stable review</nowiki>, Torvalds, Linus, 2013-07-15, 2013-07-17] 2010s, 2013

People, Way, Home, Lying

“There is a world of difference, psychologically speaking, between the passive observation that Things Don't Work Out Very Well, and the active, penetrating insight that. Complex Systems Exhibit Unexpected Behavior.”

John Gall (1925–2014) American physician

Source: General systemantics, an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., 1975, p. 33 cited in: Stanley A. Clayes, David Gelvin Spencer, Martin S. Stanford (1979) Contexts for composition. p. 94

World, Behavior

“Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Expostulation and Reply, st. 6 (1798).
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

“Every time a Black Freedom Fighter is murdered or captured, the pigs try to create the impression that they have quashed the movement, destroyed our forces, and put down the Black Revolution. The pigs also try to give the impression that five or ten guerrillas are responsible for every revolutionary action carried out in amerika. That is nonsense. That is absurd. Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression. We are being manufactured in droves in the ghetto streets, places like attica, san quentin, bedford hills, leavenworth, and sing sing. They are turning out thousands of us. Many jobless Black veterans and welfare mothers are joining our ranks. Brothers and sisters from all walks of life, who are tired of suffering passively, make up the BLA.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

To My People (July 4, 1973)

Life, Sister, Freedom, Suffering

“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 (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Second Sin (1973), p. 45.

Money, World

“Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.”

David Eagleman (1971) neuroscientist and author

Incognito: The Secret Lives of The Brain

Reality

“What is the defining difference between passive and active citizens? Curiously, it isn't income, geography, or even education. It depends on whether or not they read for pleasure and participate in the arts. These cultural activities seem to awaken a heightened sense of individual awareness and social responsibility.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Commencement speech, Stanford University (2007-06-17)
Speeches and lectures

Pleasure, Education, Art, Sense

“Adrian Slywotzky believes the Internet will overturn the inefficient push model of supplier-customer interaction. He predicts that in all sorts of markets, customers will use choiceboards—interactive, on-line systems that let people design their own products by choosing from a menu of attributes, prices, and delivery options. And he explores how the shifting role of the customer—from passive recipient to active designer—will change the way companies compete.”

Adrian Slywotzky (1951) American economist

Adrian J. Slywotzky, Clayton M. Christensen, Richard S. Tedlow, Nicholas G. Carr (2000) "The future of commerce." Harvard Business Review Vol 78.1. p. 39-53. ( abstract http://hbr.org/product/future-of-commerce-hbr-onpoint-enhanced-edition/an/4681-PDF-ENG).

People, Way, Change

“Without unleashing the power of life-destroying missiles or forcing obedience to a particular law, rainbows dissolve preoccupation with the predictably ordinary and encourage belief in the extra-ordinary. Such belief, such inspiration, provides much more than passive hopefulness.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(p. 47, Tao of the Rainbow).
Book Sources, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry (2014)

Life, Law, Hope

“"If the trade is at present carried on to the same extent and nearly in the same manner, while we are delaying from year to year to put a stop to our part in it, the blood of many thousands of our helpless, much injured fellow creatures is crying against us. The pitiable state of the survivors who are torn from their relatives, connections, and their native land must be taken into account. I fear the African trade is a national sin, for the enormities which accompany it are now generally known; and though, perhaps, the greater part of the nation would be pleased if it were suppressed, yet, as it does not immediately affect their own interest, they are passive. {… ] Can we wonder that the calamities of the present war begin to be felt at home, when we ourselves wilfully and deliberately inflict much greater calamities upon the native Africans, who never offended us?. "Woe unto thee that spoilest, and thou wast not spoiled when thou shalt cease to spoil, thou shalt be spoiled"”

John Newton (1725–1807) Anglican clergyman and hymn-writer

Alluding to the biblical verse in Isaiah 33:1. As quoted in The Works of the Rev. John Newton... to which are Prefixed Memoirs of His Life (1839), Vol. 2, U. Hunt., page 438.

War, Fear, Home, Parting

“True artistic experience is never passive, for the spectator is obliged to participate, as it were, in the continuous or discontinuous variations of proportions, positions, lines and planes. Moreover, he must see clearly how this play of repeated or non-repeated changes may give rise to a new harmony of relations which will constitute the unity of the work. Every part becomes organized into a whole with the other parts. All the parts contribute to the unity of the composition, none of them assuming a dominant place in the whole.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote from 'Grundbegriffe der neuen Gestaltenden Kunst', essay by Van Doesburg (published between 1921-23 in De Stijl) - last Chapter; as quoted in 'Fifty Years of Accomplishment, From Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock', by Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co. 1964, p. 86
1920 – 1926

Change, Parting

“Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.”

Herman Melville book Bartleby, the Scrivener

Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853)

Personality

“Fine thoughts and moral dissertations from men who have not worked and suffered may be read, but they will be forgotten. No religion, no Ethical philosophy is worth anything, if the teacher has not lived the "life of an apostle," and been ready to die "the death of a martyr." "Not in passivity [the passive affects], but in activity, lie the evil and the good of the rational social animal, just as his virtue and his vice lie not in passivity, but in activity"”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

IX. 16
The Philosophy of Antoninus

Life, Death, Men, Lie

“Plants and plant-eaters co-evolved. And plants aren't the passive partners in the chain of terrestrial life. Hence today's Pop Ecology movement is quite wrong in believing that plants are happy to fill their role as fodder for herbivores in a harmonious and perfectly balanced ecosystem. A birch tree doesn't feel cosmic fulfillment when a moose munches its leaves; the tree species, in fact, evolves to fight the moose, to keep the animal's munching lips away from vulnerable young leaves and twigs. In the final analysis, the merciless hand of natural selection will favor the birch genes that make the tree less and less palatable to the moose in generation after generation. No plant species could survive for long by offering itself as unprotected fodder.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 179
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life, Happiness, Feeling, Nature

“I have said that, in a sense, the parasites were a 'shadow' of man's cowardice and passivity. Their strength could increase in an atmosphere of defeat and panic, for it fed on human fear. In that case, the best way to combat them was to change the atmosphere to one of strength and purpose.”

Colin Wilson book The Mind Parasites

Source: The Mind Parasites (1967), p. 188

Fear, Way, Sense, Change

“Passivity can be a provoking modus operandi;
Consider the Empire and Gandhi.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

"I Never Even Suggested It"
Many Long Years Ago (1945)

“Surrealism in its early period offered specific methods to bring images closer to concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusive passive and receptive role of the 'surrealist subject', are bankrupt and are giving way to new surrealist methods for the systematic exploration of the irrational... The new delirious images of concrete irrationality suggest their physical, real 'possibility'; they go beyond the domain of psycho-analysable fantasies and 'virtual' representations... Against the dream memory and impossible, virtual images of purely receptive states that one can only recount, the physical facts of 'objective' irrationality with which one can already hurt oneself.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 23 - on new Surrealism techniques and methods.

Dreams, Way, Memory, Hurt

“The most serious flaw of Foucault's system is in the area of sex. I view his hurried, compulsive writing as a massive rationalist defense-formation to avoid thinking about (a) woman, (b) nature, (c) emotion, and (d) the sexual body. His attempt to make the body passive property of male society is an evasion of the universal fact so intolerable to him: that we are all born of human mothers. By turning women into ciphers, he miniaturizes and contains them.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 230

Women, Sex, Nature, Thinking

“Yesterday Paris gave a sad spectacle which contrasts with the sang-froid of these last days and with the sang-froid of the whole of France. There were many incidents of pillaging of shops. The dairies of the Maggi company were widely plundered; it is true that the cause of this violence is competition between this company and small milk suppliers. But, on top of this, German and Austrian shops were looted; and the police stood passively by these scenes of disorder: officers even watched them with a certain complicity. I instructed Malvy [Minister of the Interior] to ask Hennion [Prefect of Police] to be merciless and to maintain public order at all costs. The fomenters will appear before a war tribunal.”

Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934) 10th President of the French Republic

Diary entry (3 August 1914), quoted in John Keiger, 'France' in Keith Wilson (ed.), Decisions for War 1914 (London: University College London Press, 1995), p. 137.

War, Sadness, Appearance

“Disorderly, unorganised and petty terrorist acts may, if carried to extremes, only scatter and squander our forces. That is a fact, which, of course, should not be forgotten. On the other hand, under no circumstances should it be forgotten that a slogan calling for an uprising has already been issued, that the uprising has already begun. To launch attacks under favourable circumstances is not only every revolutionary’s right, but his plain duty. The killing of spies, policemen, gendarmes, the blowing up of police stations, the liberation of prisoners, the seizure of government funds for the needs of the uprising—such operations are already being carried out wherever insurrection is rife, in Poland and in the Caucasus, and every detachment of the revolutionary army must be ready to start such operations at a moment’s notice. Each group should remember that if it allows a favourable opportunity for such an operation to slip by today, it will be guilty of unpardonable inactivity, of passivity—and such an offence is the greatest crime a revolutionary can commit at a time of insurrection, the greatest disgrace that can befall anyone who is striving for liberty in deed, and not in word alone.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

As quoted in Tasks of Revolutionary Army Contingents, Collected Works, Vol. 9, pages. 420-24.
Attributions

Time

“I am not a Jacob wrestling with God, but a Job lying on his dung-hill. I have assimilated Western thought and its clarity, but, in fact, I am solidly rooted in the passive Eastern nature and remain rebellious to any action. The book, the cell, the presence at the altar and at lengthy church ceremonies, and above all the solitude and withdrawal from the world -- this is the atmosphere which suits me; it is there that I feel like a fish in the water. I cannot lead an active and contemplative life at the same time. You know how much I love the Jesuits, but their ideal (to unite contemplation with action) is not within my means.”

Leonid Feodorov (1879–1935) Exarch of the Russian Catholic Church

Fr. Paul Mailleux, "Exarch Leonid Feodorov," page 181.
In a letter to Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky.

Love, Life, God, Books

“Just as we say “listening and hearing,” “looking and seeing,” so we ought to have two expressions to distinguish active reading from passive.”

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer

Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), p. 47

Reading

“Economic responsibility goes with military strength and an undue share in the costs of peacekeeping. Free riders are perhaps more noticeable in this area than in the economy, where a number of rules in trade, capital movements, payments and the like have been evolved and accepted as legitimate. Free ridership means that disproportionate costs must be borne by responsible nations, which must on occasion take care of the international or system interest at some expense in falling short of immediate goals. This is a departure from the hard nosed school of international relations in political science, represented especially perhaps by Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger, who believe that national interest and the balance of power constitute a stable system. Leadership, moreover, had overtones of the white man's burden, father knows best, the patronizing attitude of the lady of the manor with her Christmas baskets. The requirement, moreover, is for active, and not merely passive responsibility of the German—Japanese variety. With free riders, and the virtually certain emergency of thrusting newcomers, passivity is a recipe for disarray. The danger for world stability is the weakness of the dollar, the loss of dedication of the United States to the international system's interest, and the absence of candidates to fill the resultant vacua.”

Charles P. Kindleberger (1910–2003) American economic historian

"Economic Responsibility", The Second Fred Hirsch Memorial Lecture, Warwick University, 6 March 1980, republished in Comparative Political Economy: A Retrospective (2003)

World, School, Departure, Science

“Every social occurrence as such, consists of an interaction between individuals. In other words, each individual is at the same time an active and a passive agent in a transaction. In case of superiority and inferiority, however, the relation assumes the appearance of a one-sided operation; the one party appears to exert, while the other seems merely to receive an influence.”

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) German sociologist, philosopher, and critic

Source: Superiority and Subordination as Subject-matter of Sociology (1896), p. 169

Appearance, Time

“Like Rimbaud before them, the surrealists abandoned the aesthetic altogether; it takes a certain courage to leave poetry for Africa [as Rimbaud himself did]. They revealed their insight as essentially moral in never forgetting for a moment that most living is a process of conforming to an established order which is inhuman in its drives and consequences. Their hatred sustained them through all the humiliating situations in which the modern artist find himself, and led them to conceptions beyond the reach of more passive souls. For them true 'poetry' was freedom from mechanical social responses. No wonder they loved the work of children and the insane – if not the creatures themselves.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 39-40

Love, Children, Soul, Courage

“He was a revealing symbol. He called himself passive-aggressive. There was self-pity, whining. There was a diminishment, a diminution. He was sitting there in his sweater, hunched over his guitar, looking like a little lost boy. Compare that with the great figures of my generation: Jimi Hendrix. Pete Townshend. Keith Richards.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

On Kurt Cobain
Playboy interview (May 1995)

Boy

“I think they [the public] should not look for, but look passively — and try to receive what the painting has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for... and I think the unconsciousness drives do mean a lot in looking at paintings... I think it should enjoyed just as music is enjoyed — after a while you may like it or you may not. But it doesn't seem to be too serious. I like some flowers, and others, other flowers I don't like. I think at least it gives — at least give it a chance.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Source: 1950's, Interview by William Wright, Summer 1950, pp. 139-140

Music, Flowers, Idea, Thinking

“Lucas and Sargent’s main argument was that Keynesian economics had ignored the full implications of the effect of expectations on behavior. The way to proceed, they argued, was to assume that people formed expectations as rationally as they could, based on the information they had. Thinking of people as having rational expectations had three major implications, all highly damaging to Keynesian macroeconomics. …
The first implication was that existing macroeconomic models could not be used to help design policy. … The second implication was that when rational expectations were introduced in Keynesian models, these models actually delivered very un-Keynesian conclusions. … The third implication was that if people and firms had rational expectations, it was wrong to think of policy as the control of a complicated but passive system. Rather, the right way was to think of policy as a game between policy makers and the economy. …
To summarize: When rational expectations were introduced, Keynesian models could not be used to determine policy; Keynesian models could not explain long-lasting deviations of output from the natural level of output; the theory of policy had to be redesigned, using the tools of game theory.”

Olivier Blanchard (1948) French economist

Source: Macroeconomics (7th Edition, 2017), Ch. 24 : Epilogue: The Story of Macroeconomics

People, Way, Behavior, Game

“The change toward larger Gestalten and the necessity of this change for both humanistic and formal reasons can be illustrated by considering Sullivan's emphasis upon the phenomena of interaction. This emphasis is very clearly part of a defense of man against the older, more mechanistic thinking which saw him so heavily determined by his internal psychological structure that he could easily be manipulated by pressing the appropriate buttons — a doctrine which made the therapeutic interview into a one-way process with the patient in a relatively passive role. The Sullivanian doctrine places the therapeutic interview on a human level, defining it as a significant meeting between two human beings. The role of the therapist is no longer to be dehumanized in terms of definable purposes which he can plan, and the role of the patient is no longer dehumanized into that of an object of manipulation”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, 1951, p. 263 partly cited in: Cecil Holden Patterson (1958) Counseling the emotionally disturbed. p. 197

Way, Thinking, Change, Parting

“A deadly streak of passivity of a kind that sometimes goes with perfectionism.”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

"Miss Jean Stafford," p. 71
Essays in Disguise (1990)

“As Cioran correctly points out, a principal danger of being overcivilized is that one all to easily relapses, out of sheer exhaustion and the unsatisfied need to be “stimulated,” into a vulgar and passive barbarism. Thus, “the man who unmasks his fictions” through an indiscriminate pursuit of the lucidity that is promoted by modern liberal culture “renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depth.” There, he concludes, “no man concerned with his own equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.””

Susan Sontag book Styles of Radical Will

“‘Thinking against oneself’: reflections on Cioran,” p. 85
Styles of Radical Will (1966)

Sense

“Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 1

Nature, Change

“Passivity writhes in resistance to the progressive impulse of revolution.”

Práxedis Guerrero (1882–1910) Mexican journalist and anarchist revolutionary

La resistencia del pasivismo se revuelve ahora contra el impulso progresista de la revolución. Passivity and Rebellion (29 de Agosto 1909), Punto Rojo, N° 3, El Paso, Texas, translated by Javier Sethness-Castro. http://blackrosefed.org/i-am-action-praxedis-guerrero/

“In every human being one or the other of these two instincts is predominant: the active or positive instinct to offer hospitality, the negative or passive instinct to accept it. And either of these instincts is so significant of character that one might as well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.”

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer

Hosts and Guests (1918), Harper's Monthly ( August 1919 http://books.google.com/books?id=H2Q2AQAAMAAJ&q=%22Mankind+is+divisible+into+two+great+classes+hosts+and+guests%22&pg=PA425#v=onepage) And Even Now http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/evnow10.txt (1920)

“All our communities have to make the effort to reach out to each other rather than waiting passively for gestures that may never be made. We need to write our stories and sing our songs together not necessarily in unison or in tune but in a way that makes space for all of us.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Opening address to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association conference in Nadi, 6 September 2005.

Way, Communication, Effort, Singing

“Indeed, our society, which has seemed so freedom-giving and passive in its attitudes toward the artist really makes extraordinary demands upon him: on the one side, to be free in some vague spiritual sense, free to act only as an artist, and yet on the other side to be rigorously tested as to whether the freedom he has achieved is great enough to be more solidly dependable than a government's financial structure... No wonder that modern painters, in view of these curious relations to society, have taken art matters into their own hands, decides for themselves what art is, what its subjects are to be, and how they are to be treated. Art like love is an active process of growth and development.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Source: 1950s, The painter and the audience' (1954), p. 108

Love, Art, Sense, Freedom

“The Buddhists maintain that there is no Creator but an infinitude of creative powers, which collectively form the one eternal substance, the essence of which is inscrutable — hence not a subject for speculation for any true philosopher. Socrates invariably refused to argue upon the mystery of universal being, yet no one would ever have thought of charging him with atheism, except those who were bent upon his destruction. Upon inaugurating an active period, says the Secret Doctrine, an expansion of this Divine essence, from within outwardly, occurs in obedience to eternal and immutable law, and the phenomenal or visible universe is the ultimate result of the long chain of cosmical forces thus progressively set in motion. In like manner, when the passive condition is resumed, a contraction of the Divine essence takes place, and the previous work of creation is gradually and progressively undone. The visible universe becomes disintegrated, its material dispersed; and "darkness," solitary and alone, broods once more over the face of the "deep." To use a metaphor which will convey the idea still more clearly, an outbreathing of the "unknown essence" produces the world; and an inhalation causes it to disappear. This process has been going on from all eternity, and our present universe is but one of an infinite series which had no beginning and will have no end.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume II, Chapter VI

Secret, World, Law, Idea

“Every active deed is etched in the matrix of passivity.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 540

“Revolutionaries see history as a creation of their own spirit, as being made up of a continuous series of violent tugs at the other forces of society - both active and passive, and they prepare the maximum of favourable conditions for the definitive tug”

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and linguist

revolution
Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971).

History

“No doubt, hatred and cursing are not the proper attitude. It is true also that to look upon all things and all people with a calm and clear vision, to be uninvolved and impartial in one's judgments is a quite proper yogic attitude. A condition of perfect samata [equanimity] can be established in which one sees all as equal, friends and enemies included, and is not disturbed by what men do or by what happens. The question is whether this is all that is demanded from us. If so, then the general attitude will be of a neutral indifference to everything. But the Gita, which strongly insists on a perfect and absolute samata, goes on to say, 'Fight, destroy the adversary, conquer.' If there is no kind of general action wanted, no loyalty to Truth as against Falsehood except for one's personal sadhana, no will for the Truth to conquer, then the samata of indifference will suffice. But here there is a work to be done, a Truth to be established against which immense forces are arrayed, invisible forces which can use visible things and persons and actions for their instruments. If one is among the disciples, the seekers of this Truth, one has to take sides for the Truth, to stand against the forces that attack it and seek to stifle it. Arjuna wanted not to stand for either side, to refuse any action of hostility even against assailants; Sri Krishna, who insisted so much on samata, strongly rebuked his attitude and insisted equally on his fighting the adversary. 'Have samata,' he said, 'and seeing clearly the Truth, fight.' Therefore to take sides with the Truth and to refuse to concede anything to the Falsehood that attacks, to be unflinchingly loyal and against the hostiles and the attackers, is not inconsistent with equality…. It is a spiritual battle inward and outward; by neutrality and compromise or even passivity one may allow the enemy force to pass and crush down the Truth and its children. If you look at it from this point, you will see that if the inner spiritual equality is right, the active loyalty and firm taking of sides is as right, and the two cannot be incompatible.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

September 13, 1936
India's Rebirth

Men, Hostility, Children, People

“Active Evil is better than Passive Good.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

1780s, Annotations to Lavater (1788)

Evil

“The technophiles are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride into the unknown. Many people understand something of what technological progress is doing to us yet take a passive attitude toward it because they think it is inevitable. But we (FC) don't think it is inevitable. We think it can be stopped, and we will give here some indications of how to go about stopping it.”

Theodore Kaczynski book Industrial Society and Its Future

"Strategy", item 180
Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)

People, Understanding, Thinking

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

Mario Savio (1942–1996) American activist

Speech, Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley (1964-12-02).

People, Time, Heart, Parting

“Under these circumstances, there has arisen in society a figure which is certainly the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed, for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and sinfulness of man. Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and of despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilisations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people.”

William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838–1903) British politician

Referring to the figure of the prostitute.
Source: A History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869), Chapter 5 (3rd edition pages 282-283).

Death, Happiness, People, Age

“And here one may note a curious comparison which can be made between this [ascidian] life-history and that of many a respectable pinnacle and gargoyle on the social fabric. Every respectable citizen of the professional classes passes through a period of activity and imagination, of "liveliness and eccentricity," of "Sturm und Drang." He shocks his aunts. Presently, however, he realizes the sober aspect of things. He becomes dull; he enters a profession; suckers appear on his head; and he studies. Finally, by virtue of these he settles down—he marries. All his wild ambitions and subtle æsthetic perceptions atrophy as needless in the presence of calm domesticity. He secretes a house, or "establishment," round himself, of inorganic and servile material. His Bohemian tail is discarded. Henceforth his life is a passive receptivity to what chance and the drift of his profession bring along; he lives an almost entirely vegetative excrescence on the side of a street, and in the tranquillity of his calling finds that colourless contentment that replaces happiness.”

H. G. Wells book Zoological Retrogression

Zoological Retrogression (1891)

Life, Happiness, Secret, Imagination

“There is… something which is in energy only; and there is something which is both in energy and capacity. …of relatives, one is predicated as according to excess and defect: another according to the effective and passive, and, in short, the motive, and that which may be moved… Motion, however, has not a substance separate from things… But each of the categories subsists in a twofold manner in all things. Thus… one thing pertaining to it is form, and another privation. …So the species of motion and mutation are as many as those of being. But since in every genus of things, there is that which is in entelecheia, and that which is in capacity; motion is the entelecheia of that which is in capacity… That there is energy, therefore, and that a thing then happens to be moved, when this energy exists, and neither prior nor posterior to it, is manifest. … [N]either motion nor mutation can be placed in any other genus; nor have those who have advanced a different opinion concerning it spoken rightly. …for by some motion is said to be difference, inequality, and non-being; though it is not necessary that any of these should be moved… Neither is mutation into these, nor from these, rather than from their opposites. …The cause, however, why motion appears to be indefinite, is because it can neither be simply referred to the capacity, nor to the energy of beings. …[I]t is difficult to apprehend what motion is: for it is necessary to refer it either to privation, or to capacity, or to simple energy; but it does not appear that it can be any of these. The above-mentioned mode, therfore remains, viz. that it is a certain energy; but… difficult to be perceived, but which may have a subsistence.”

Aristotle book Physics

Book III, Ch. I, pp. 137-147.
Physics

Motivation, Appearance

“The Moon was the symbol of the passive capacity of nature to produce, the female, of which the life-giving power and energy was the male.”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. I : Apprentice, The Twelve-Inch Rule and Common Gavel, p. 1
Context: The Sun is the ancient symbol of the life-giving and generative power of the Deity. To the ancients, light was the cause of life; and God was the source from which all light flowed; the essence of Light, the Invisible Fire, developed as Flame manifested as light and splendor. The Sun was his manifestation and visible image; and the Sabæans worshipping the Light — God, seemed to worship the Sun, in whom they saw the manifestation of the Deity.
The Moon was the symbol of the passive capacity of nature to produce, the female, of which the life-giving power and energy was the male. It was the symbol of Isis, Astarte, and Artemis, or Diana. The "Master of Life" was the Supreme Deity, above both, and manifested through both; Zeus, the Son of Saturn, become King of the Gods; Horus, son of Osiris and Isis, become the Master of Life; Dionusos or Bacchus, like Mithras, become the author of Light and Life and Truth.

Life, Nature

“Awake, my soul! not only passive praise
Thou owest!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni" (1802)
Context: Awake, my soul! not only passive praise
Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears,
Mute thanks and secret ecstasy. Awake,
Voice of sweet song! awake, my heart, awake!
Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn.

Soul

“I can guarantee you this, the days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies, those days are over!”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

2010s, 2015, Address to the United States Congress (March 2015)
Context: I wish I could promise you, Elie, that the lessons of history have been learned. I can only urge the leaders of the world not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Not to sacrifice the future for the present; not to ignore aggression in the hopes of gaining an illusory peace. But I can guarantee you this, the days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies, those days are over! We are no longer scattered among the nations, powerless to defend ourselves. We restored our sovereignty in our ancient home. And the soldiers who defend our home have boundless courage. For the first time in 100 generations, we, the Jewish people, can defend ourselves. This is why; this is why, as a prime minister of Israel, I can promise you one more thing: Even if Israel has to stand alone, Israel will stand. But I know that Israel does not stand alone. I know that America stands with Israel. know that you stand with Israel. You stand with Israel, because you know that the story of Israel is not only the story of the Jewish people but of the human spirit that refuses again and again to succumb to history's horrors. Facing me right up there in the gallery, overlooking all of us in this august chamber is the image of Moses. Moses led our people from slavery to the gates of the Promised Land. And before the people of Israel entered the land of Israel, Moses gave us a message that has steeled our resolve for thousands of years.

People

“Sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce the basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Source: Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, 1993, p. 69
Context: Sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce the basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It's unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what's happening in the world. In fact, it's undesirable -- if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it.

Fear, Imagination, Personality

“Life is a creative endeavor. It is active, not passive.”

Julia Cameron (1948) American writer

Blessings (1998)
Context: Life is a creative endeavor. It is active, not passive. We are the yeast that leavens our lives into rich, fully baked loaves. When we experience our lives as flat and lackluster, it is our consciousness that is at fault. We hold the inner key that turns our lives from thankless to fruitful. That key is "Blessing."

Life

“Never have I felt so much anger, unjust, and indignation for how things are, how people are and how it affected me and probably many others too. Before that I was passive, soft-spoken and enjoyed the supposed goodness of the world. Never again would I be the same.”

Amos Yee (1998) blogger

Tumblr postings
Context: Then of course I recall the incident which I think had some form of deep, psychological impact on me. The time where I was compelled to read out the most insincere, hypocritical ‘apology’ out loud to my fellow peers, that was written by teachers, for a video that should be more abhorred for its stupidity than for its supposed racism, that was absolutely non-existent. I witnessed firsthand, things that were completely beyond my level of comprehension at that time, that was completely beyond my preconceptions of how a school worked, where rules of an official institution was dictated by the unreliable stupidity of the public, and where punishment was dictated not by logic, or by an understanding of a scenario, but because, a book says so. That ‘apology’ given two years ago, and the subsequent deletion of my first Youtube account was not a sign that I knew my ‘mistakes’ and wanted to ‘change for the better’, it was a sign that other people effectively made me say so. Never have I felt so much anger, unjust, and indignation for how things are, how people are and how it affected me and probably many others too. Before that I was passive, soft-spoken and enjoyed the supposed goodness of the world. Never again would I be the same.

People, World, Anger

Quotes about passive page 3

Quotes about passive
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