Top 105 Passive Quotes

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.

I’m not a passive person by any stretch of the imagination.

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.

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

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.

If you’re truly depicting human behavior in an honest way, it is a lot of miscommunication, non-communication, paranoia, passive aggressiveness. People don’t finish sentences. They don’t say what they mean. They lie to each other. They take credit for things that are actually other people’s ideas.

The biggest thing that I get most excited about is, my family and I would watch television together, and we weren’t just passive viewers. Something would happen, and then we would talk about it. When Will Smith was shot on ‘Fresh Prince,’ that sparked a conversation about safety.

Television is, in many respects, a passive medium: people receive information without really exchanging ideas with others. By contrast, the Internet can be an active medium, allowing individuals to use e-mail, discussion groups, and even Web sites to engage with one another.

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.

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.

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.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

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.

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.

Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.

I don’t even really see sit-ins and marches as passive. I see them as quite assertive. I see those as emotionally aggressive tactics. I see people putting their lives on the line and being bold and brave.

It’s absolutely fine to be a bit more reactive and not chase after the ball at times. But you cannot be passive.

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.

I had learned that science is a rewarding, active process of discovery, not the passive absorption of what others had discovered.

Disco told audiences to dance, while punk told them to be anything but passive. The artists didn’t mind; in fact, they encouraged it.

When the facts are on your side, there is huge power in pitching with questions. Because questions are active rather than passive. They necessitate a response.

When we do an investment, we always ask, ‘Can we affect the outcome? When buying a company, can we have an impact?’ That’s a different style of investing than a passive investor in the stock market. To me, that’s how you’re taking the risk out of it. You know what your capability is and how you can enhance value.

I’m easygoing. There’s a place and time for everything. When that bell rings, I’m not nice and easy. I’m not meek and passive.

In our evolutionary narratives, the organism itself often seems to play a passive role: a powerless victim, almost, of changes to its environment or mutations in its genes.

For me, the Immaculate Conception is the feast of ‘passive action,’ the action that functions simply by the transmission through us of divine energy. Purity, in spite of outward appearances, is essentially an active virtue, because it concentrates God in us and on those who are subject to our influence.

I look at safety as, you know, there’s active and passive. Passive is how do you survive a crash. Active is accident avoidance. And so that’s real-time information to you, as a driver, and to your car, to the wheels of a car that will get you out of a bad situation.

To be depressed or neurotic is passive. It happened to us; we are its victim, and we have no control over it.

Women are not inherently passive or peaceful.

I was never argued out of faith; it was much more passive than that – and I wasn’t argued back in, either.

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

What’s so useful about the British culture of politeness is the level of passive aggression is really fun to write.

Observation is a passive science, experimentation an active science.

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.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.

I think you can’t be passive in making this film – or in watching it.

Passive pleasure is no pleasure at all.

We have to start thinking of ourselves as citizens of the Internet, not just passive users. I don’t see how we can bring about change in our digital lives if we don’t take responsibility.

Passive righteousness tells us that God does not need our good works. Active righteousness tells us that our neighbor does. The aim and direction of good works are horizontal, not vertical.

Before, I was really passive, all I cared about was being in love with my boyfriend. I didn’t have any creative power, nothing. I don’t know that person any more.

The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.

It’s so easy to use tired, shopworn figures of speech. I love using long, fancy words but have learned – mostly from writing my biography of Winston Churchill – that short, strong words work better. I am ever-vigilant against the passive and against jargon, both of which are so insidious.

Often with bigotry it’s passive not active.

Passive aggressors who are adept at this will have trained themselves to remain calm, while you get irritated and emotional.

As I get older, I find myself getting angrier and angrier. Doubtless, change itself, not to mention physical decline and inevitable petty tragedies of disappointed expectations, would have made for resentment in any event; but I used to be a passive schoolboy, my negative impulses turned obediently inward.

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.

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

Most people have a passive relationship with music and clothes, with culture. But music was my first contact with anything creative. Music is it, as far as I’m concerned.

The concept of muse is alien to me. To speak of a muse implies there is a couple in which one person is the objectified passive element – there to help the creative, active, often male part of the duo to create. A muse is very passive. Who wants a muse? I don’t want a muse.

Active investment is a zero-sum game. Passive managers don’t play the game. They buy something resembling the market as a whole, or some segment of the market, and they don’t respond to the actions of active managers.

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

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

The crucial question one comes back to is the examination; without that experience is meaningless. And I think it’s true that society is becoming more and more passive, less and less fired up with enthusiasm, in many spheres.

I encourage people not to be passive consumers of music and of culture in general. And feeling like, yeah, you can enjoy the products of professionals, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to completely give up the reins and give up every connection to music or whatever it happens to be.

The smug complacency of technology adverts disguises a pretty mixed picture, with too many people not connected, too many passive users of technologies designed for interactive, and far too much talk about empowerment but far too little action to make it happen.

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.

Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice. I’ve never considered it a neutral or passive profession.

Once we realize the extraordinary power we have to compose our lives, we’ll move from passive, conditioned thinking to being co-creators of our fate.

Our culture loves movies and TV, which is wonderful, but there’s something a little bit passive sometimes about watching, because you’re looking at other people’s imagination at work.

We always talk about how, obviously, there is still very in-your-face aggressive racism. But there’s a lot of passive racism that, in the moment, you don’t even realize is racist. You chalk it up as a strange interaction you had, and then you look at the context of it later on and realize the root of it was racism.

When I produce a record, I roll up my sleeves; I’m not one of those passive guys. I really get in there and make sure every note is measured. I tell the bass player, ‘You have to play it like this,’ or I tell the drummer, ‘It’s got to be like this.’

You might say I was a passive atheist through my teenage years.

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.’

What passes for political realism may make for lively academic debates. But it often functions, ironically, as a tool of social control, rendering us passive with an analysis that overwhelms and paralyzes us.

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.

Female psychotic bosses can be particularly devilish. They will tend to mix in a lot of passive aggression, making you feel guilty for all kinds of things.

I’m not passive aggressive. If something bothers me, I think about it, then I act on it. I express it.

I think the thing we see is that as people are using video games more, they tend to watch passive TV a bit less. And so using the PC for the Internet, playing video games, is starting to cut into the rather unbelievable amount of time people spend watching TV.

For a gun-toting nation, Americans are surprisingly passive.

If all Church power vests in the clergy, then the people are practically bound to passive obedience in all matters of faith and practice; for all right of private judgment is then denied.

The simplest and cheapest of all reforms within institutional science is to switch from the passive to the active voice in writing about science.

I don’t want anyone to think I took this role in ‘Downsizing’ because it was the only role available to me. I’m not a passive participant in it.

Prayer is not passive. It takes a big man to pray – and to admit that he prays.

Corporate America cannot afford to remain silent or passive about the downward spiral we are undergoing. It cannot turn a blind eye to how difficult the experience of life is for so many of their customers.

My dad always told me that, as far as he’s concerned, I can do whatever I choose in life as long as I’m happy and can handle the consequences of bad decisions. He only ever said that when he thought I was doing the wrong thing. I would employ similar passive aggression.

Mental events, it is said, are not passive happenings but the acts of a subject.

Maverick is a word which appeals to me more than misfit. Maverick is active, misfit is passive.

In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard.

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.’

One secret of leadership is that the mind of a leader never turns off. Leaders even when they are sightseers or spectators, are active; not passive observers.

It ain’t passive. It ain’t TV. Go out there and rock n’ roll and dance and have fun.

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

Black people are expected to be passive citizens, good immigrants, mute and grateful.

In order to continue in office, any government (not simply a ‘democratic‘ government) must have the support of the majority of its subjects. This support, it must be noted, need not be active enthusiasm; it may well be passive resignation as if to an inevitable law of nature.

Describing passive violence in this culture is kinda like someone who is drowning in the middle of the ocean giving you the low-down on water. The only way you can really understand passive violence is by going somewhere far, far away from phones, news, TV, the Internet.

The problem with most children‘s hospitals is that they are passive. They are high quality. They are filled with the best doctors. But their function is to wait until kids get sick and get referred in.

I am not a passive person, but I chose to fall into a more submissive role in our relationship because I wanted to do everything in my power to make my marriage and family work.

I’m always a little passive and can come across as being pathetic.

Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.

Passive fatalism can never be the role of a revolutionary party, like the Social Democracy.

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.

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.

For too long, history has imposed a binary condition on its black citizens: either nameless or renowned, menial or exceptional, passive recipients of the forces of history or superheroes who acquire mythic status not just because of their deeds but because of their scarcity.

Refuse to be a lazy Christian, and resist a passive, apathetic attitude.

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.

Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.

Passive violence can be as simple as someone honking their horn at you for not turning fast enough when the light changes. And it can be highly complex, like when your co-worker undermines all of your work relationships by spreading rumors and lies about you. That’s how passive violence rolls.

My mother wasn’t strong like my aunt. She was just very passive.

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.

I’ve made so many people angry that they kind of blur into one unpleasant memory of people staring at you with somewhere between passive aggression and active aggression.

Active Evil is better than Passive Good.

Change the conversation you’re having in the mirror with yourself… if you hear someone who is saying something that is bringing them down, stop it. Don’t be passive. Actually, take action and say, ‘I wouldn’t speak to my best friend like that.’

Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.

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.