Passivity Quotes - Page 4

• 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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• 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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• Often, though, the passivity of the woman's role weighs on me, suffocates me. Rather than wait for his pleasure, I would like to take it, to run wild. Is it that which pushes me into lesbianism? It terrifies me. Do women act thus? Does June go to Henry when she wants him? Does she mount him? Does she wait for him? He guides my inexperienced hands. It is like a forest fire, to be with him. New places of my body are aroused and burnt. He is incendiary. I leave him in an unquenchable fever.

  Anais Nin

  Running, Fire, June

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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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• So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Pain, Men, Dying

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “Gravity's Rainbow”, p.580, Penguin

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• (From the story The Last Days of a Famous Mime) He said nothing. He was mildly annoyed at her presumption: that he had not thought this many, many times before. With perfect misunderstanding she interpreted his passivity as disdain. Wishing to hurt him, she slapped his face. Wishing to hurt her, he smiled brilliantly.

  Peter Carey

  Hurt, Perfect, Annoyed

  Peter Carey (1994). “Collected stories”

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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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• I cannot have chaos erupting around me until I am prepared for it. I am a collector. I am an observer. I don't participate. My resources, and my standing, must be secure before I can allow the uncertainty of war to crash down upon us.

  Derek Landy

  War, Chaos, Crash

  Derek Landy (2015). “Skulduggery Pleasant -”, p.115, HarperCollins UK

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• The desirable virgin is sexy but not sexual. She's young, white, and skinny. She's a cheerleader, a babysitter; she's accessible and eager to please (remember those ethics of passivity!). She's never a woman of color. SHe's never a low-income girl or a fat girl. She's never disabled. "Virgin" is a designation for those who meet a certain standard of what women, especially young women, are supposed to look like. As for how these young women are supposed to act? A blank slate is best.

  Jessica Valenti

  Girl, Sexy, Color

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Physically it's kind of lassitude, the apathy and tiredness that precedes the flu or some other illness, or death. My legs ache and feel heavy, my skin has become more sensitive to cold and to heat, to the hardness or rigidity of things. Nothing interests me, I feel uncomfortable being still but would feel even more uncomfortable if I moved. I don't know whether speaking is painful or just boring. I sit here, staring straight ahead, with no desires, no needs, hollow. I'm not even sad. I feel only passivity and indifference.

  Antonio Lobo Antunes

  Desire, Skins, Apathy

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• 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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• Television is a passivity.

  John Green

  Television

  John Green (2008). “Paper Towns”, p.241, Penguin

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• The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure.

  Anais Nin

  Fighting, Men, People

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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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• The cheerleaders for neoliberalism work hard to normalize dominant institutions and relations of power through a vocabulary and public pedagogy that create market-driven subjects, modes of consciousness, and ways of understanding the world that promote accommodation, quietism and passivity.

  Henry Giroux

  Hard Work, Vocabulary, Understanding

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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