Active Engagement Quotes

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.

Knowledge is potential; action is power.

The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone.

I hear, I know. I see, I remember. I do, I understand.

I believe that one can't command sitting on one's ass in the rear. One has to up among the forward brigade commanders, even as far as battalion commanders, especially if one is fighting a defensive action. One simply has to know what is going on.

And at NYU, I went to the Atlantic Theater Company, and they have two main points. One of them is to always be active in something instead of just feeling it. And the other is figuring out your character.

When it comes to strategy, ponder less and do more.

If you ask a living teacher a question, he will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means. If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature or the world. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking an analysis yourself.

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.

I take things in better when I'm allowed to talk, and respond, and engage and move around a bit.

I don't feel active, and that my public conscience is fully satisfied.

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.

Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask, and that’s what separates the people who do things from the people who just dream about them.

Americans of good-will, the nice decent church people, the well-meaning liberals, the good hearted souls who themselves wouldn't lynch anyone, must begin to realize that they have to be more than passively good-hearted, more than church goingly Christian, and much more than word-of-mouth in the liberalism.

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

Passivity is fatal to us. Our goal is to make the enemy passive.

It's easier to stand on the sidelines, criticize, and say why you shouldn't do something. The sidelines are crowded. Get in the game.

Idleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing is a dreary course to take, be sure of it. To live idle upon the substance of society! To be useless, that is to say, noxious! This leads straight to the lowest depth of misery.

Knowing isn't doing; doing isn't knowing. Nothing but the knowing and the doing gets it done.

Listening is being able to be changed by the other person.

No good decision was ever made in a swivel chair.

It is never helpful to point at sticking points, but it is always helpful to encourage one's partners to take a more active and forward-looking approach.

While I had been, I guess, quite brilliant, academically, in my college years, I also had been editor of the paper, and I loved that. And, that was a much more active thing. And I missed it when I was doing graduate work.

Seeing something once is better than hearing about it a hundred times. Doing something once is better than seeing it a hundred times.