Passive Acceptance Quotes

Even a Dead Fish Can Go with the Flow.”

There are no evil thoughts except one; the refusal to think.

But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.

There's no light at the end of the tunnel, there isn't even a tunnel. The best thing I can do is get drunk and listen to classical music. Or sleep and wait for death to get closer. Leaving this will not be a horrible thing. Yet I'm glad, somehow, that I threw my words in the air: confetti, celebrating nothing.

...the plan will happen in spite of us, not because of us.

Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest. Tolerance is composed of nine parts of apathy to one of brotherly love.

Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material. It finds it hard to endure the feeling that it must resign itself to passive acceptance of changes introduced from above.

Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.

Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.

We should not permit tolerance to degenerate into indifference.

But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.

People habituate themselves to let things pass through their minds, as one may speak, rather than to think of them. Thus by use they become satisfied merely with seeing what is said, without going any further. Review and attention, and even forming a judgment, becomes fatigue; and to lay anything before them that requires it, is putting them quite out of their way.

And what? What's the other choice? To passively let things happen and then say: "Tut-tut, what at botch that was"? Don't we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don't we try to frame it so they'll chose as we think they should?

Let the world move along as it pleased. If it had any business with him, it would be sure to tell him.

This so-called tolerance, which, in my opinion, is nothing but a huge indifference.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

If we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.

People are just passively accepting what you tell them, so if you are on TV there is that greater responsibility to be true.

A country is not only what it does but what it tolerates.

We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.

Silence gives consent.

It is hardly a moral act to encourage others patiently to accept injustice which he himself does not endure.

They tell us sometimes that if we had only kept quiet, all these desirable things would have come about of themselves. I am reminded of the Greek clown who, having seen an archer bring down a flying bird, remarked, sagely: 'You might have saved your arrow, for the bird would anyway have been killed by the fall.'

For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.