Quotes About Inaction

if Westerners deem themselves too smart, too moral, or too soft to stop aggressors in this complex nuclear age, then—as Socrates and Aristotle alike remind us—they can indeed become real accomplices to evil through inaction.

What was everybody's business in the end proved to be nobody's business. Each one looked to the other to take the lead, and the aggressorsgot away with it.

You can't do business sitting on your ... armchair!

All my life, she thought, I have let things pass me by.

The freedom to choose not to choose. Choosing nothing instead of something.

what terrible pain—the pain of what I had not done, of what I had lost because I had not done all of that which I had not done. Whatever it was, I had no idea, I knew only that I had not done it.

As Hans Bernd Gisevius, a civil servant under Hitler and a member of the German Resistance, puts it: One of the vital lessons that we must learn from the German disaster is the ease with which a people can be sucked down into the morass of inaction; let them as individuals fall prey to overcleverness, opportunism, or cowardliness and they are irrevocably lost.

Men of thought, Anita said. Not men of action. It's begun to have a paralyzing effect.

I'm terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I 'do' anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on 'time's - it doesn't of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn't matter if you've done anything or not.

Evil will never be countered while good men do nothing.

I am always amazed by people who know something is wrong but still insist on ignoring it, as if that will somehow make it go away.

I need to be doing something, because doing nothing is just as harmful as facing danger head-on.

He was a God who observed without intervening in this hell he created -Carlisle

I like the kind of man John is. He watches things closely and then does nothing with the information.

Americans, Douglass believed, instinctively and culturally watched history and preferred not to act in it.

all that was necessary for evil to triumph was for good men—and women—to do nothing.

I was not an activist.

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.

The fruit of timidity is neither gain nor loss.

Do nothing and there shall be nothing.

Sometimes Alberta felt as if there were a conspiracy against her, as if the whole world were in agreement not to say a word. A foolish desire to shake people – But speak out, can't you – would come over her. If she did not do so, it was because we really can remain on the verge of action for a long time without doing anything.

Water does nothing yet it penetrates everything. Inaction finds the road.

Many people may be heartbroken, but not enough to take action.

I sometimes think that it's not our enemies that we resent in life, but rather friends we have who stood quietly by and did nothing.