Top 100 Passive Quotes

I don’t believe in anarchy, because it will ultimately amount to the power of the bully, with weapons. Gandhi is my life’s inspiration: passive resistance. I don’t want to live in the Thunderdome with Mad Max.

Passive inactivity, because you have not been given specific instructions to do this or to do that, is a serious deficiency.

The passive acceptance of exclusionary words and deeds is not okay.

I think a very good system in a world with a lot of passive investors is one in which there are at least a few entrepreneurial investors, prepared to say what they think, prepared to propose a change in management, change in strategy, change in cost structure, capital structure.

I’m bad on passive aggression. I know that.

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

The most disappointing thing to me after ‘Tusk’ was the politics in the band. They said, ‘We’re not going to do that again.’ I felt dead in the water from that. On ‘Mirage,’ I was treading water, saying, ‘Okay, whatever,’ and taking a passive role.

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

Cinema ceases to be passive and becomes active: you, the audience, are now, in some senses, in charge of the filmmaking process. You have all got mobile phones, you have all got cam recorders, and you’ve all got laptops, so you’re all filmmakers.

Where there seems to be a difference between guys being nuts and women being nuts is that guys are much more open in calling each other on stuff; lots of insults and dirty names. Whereas women will talk frankly and honesty, but there also seems to be more passive aggressiveness.

People – and I think this is particularly true of Americans – don’t like to be passive. They like to seize control.

I think leaders are incapable of the strength that passive resistance entails.

Say what you will about Americans, but one thing they are not is passive. The Bush administration may have pushed through the Patriot Act weeks after 11 September, but, as the American public got to grips with how the law was affecting their individual rights, their protests grew loud and angry.

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

The trap in Hamlet is he’s the most passive of Shakespeare’s characters. He’s not a Richard III, not out there taking a lot of action. It’s a lot of asides and soliloquies where he’s wrapped in angst, and that’s not a very interesting character.

I read a lot of history. The passive Jews in Germany didn’t survive. The smart ones got out.

If you look at the difference games between the bigger and smaller teams, the difference in concentration, and being passive is big; that is my opinion.

In this very real world, good doesn’t drive out evil. Evil doesn’t drive out good. But the energetic displaces the passive.

Receiving personal revelation is not a passive process. As we seek such revelations, we must prepare for these sacred experiences.

Observation is a passive science, experimentation an active science.

I need to make the characters that I play in movies more accessible to audiences, more real. As an actor, you’re always passive; you’re not making that many choices, so when something allows you to open up a bit, you want to explore your newfound freedom.

Acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, a subtle energy vibration, is consciousness.

To be sure, playing it safe isn’t a flashy style of poker. Some even claim that it’s too weak and passive. That being said, playing safe poker is still a proven recipe for success in the world’s biggest poker tournaments.

I think, on a surface level, people are surprised to see me playing such a passive role in ‘Good.’

People also think Christians are very passive people, and that drives me crazy as an athlete because if you watch me play and compete, I’m the furthest thing from passive that you’ll see on the baseball field. I love to compete, and I love to win.

There are moments I get pretty passive and just have to be aggressive.

A passive approach to professional growth will leave you by the wayside.

My dad was a very unconventional Asian American man. He was very much not quiet, not shy, not passive. If he had to fart, he’d do it in the library. He did not care. He was like, ‘I don’t know these people. I’m uncomfortable, and I need to let it go.’

There’s something really special when you take an audience and instead of just being passive and watching, you invite them to participate.

I have to just keep being aggressive. Once I see openings I just have to take them and not be passive.

It is unfortunate that Americans are no longer aware of what the constitution says and what their rights are. Because of that, we are often very passive about what happens when the government violates those rights.

Ears are made not for hearing but for listening. Listening is an active skill, whereas hearing is passive. Listening is something that we have to work at – it’s a relationship with sound. And yet, it’s a skill that none of us are taught.

You become a senator not by being passive but by being active, and all of a sudden, we’ve got a whole group just deciding to sit on their palms.

I am kinda like, if I don’t really know people I am a little passive and a little quiet, and you know most of my friends they know a different side of me, so I guess that’s what kinda Twitter gets to see a little bit, things that I would say around my friends and joke around with.

Objectivity is the subject subjugating the object. That is how you assert yourself. You make yourself the active voice and the object is the passive no-voice.

I fought violently for the autonomy of architecture. It’s a very passive, weak profession where people deliver a service. You want a blue door, you get a blue door. You want it to look neo-Spanish, you get neo-Spanish. Architecture with any authenticity represents resistance. Resistance is a good thing.

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

A president cannot sit on his hands and be seen as passive in the face of ruthless action by a foreign dictator.

Women have been brought up to be passive, accepting, not come forward and play a major role in life. And with age, there’s a tendency to revert to that – to pull back, recede. I don’t think it’s advisable or admirable.

The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child’s peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.

New Zealanders have conventions and pleasantries, but we are direct. We are encouraged to be transparent with our behavior and not to employ passive aggression.

We are not merely passive pawns of historical forces; nor are we victims of the past. We can shape and direct history.

There’s not as many passive wrestling fans as people would think. There are a lot of fans who just can’t get enough, and they’re almost more interested in what’s going on behind the scenes and the business of wrestling then they are, necessarily, of what’s going on inside of the ring.

The real or supposed rights of man are of two kinds, active and passive; the right in certain cases to do as we list; and the right we possess to the forbearance or assistance of other men.

Bad things happen when you try to let things just happen. You can’t be passive.

I always looked askance at Pandora and Spotify, regarding both as a passive means of experiencing music; they feed you music they presume you will like, and eventually you like it.

I think the most important thing for a listener is to realize that he, too, should not listen to music in a passive way; that if you sit in a concert hall and expect to be moved or taken off your seat by the music, it will not happen.

Of course. I favor passive investing for most investors, because markets are amazingly successful devices for incorporating information into stock prices.

Often with bigotry it’s passive not active.

I feel I should never do passive characters. They don’t work for me.

For us, destiny always feels… if you obey, it’s almost a passive thing.

Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.

In my view, a philanthropist is anyone who gives anything – time, money, experience, skills or networks – in any amount, to create a better world. This is not how we once thought about philanthropy. The word used to conjure up something rather passive – sitting down and writing checks.

For the longest time, neuroscientists were forced to be passive observers of brain activity.