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P Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with P. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All P Quotes

“Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.”

“Passive commerce . . . should thus . . . [compel us] to content ourselves with the first price of our commodities, and to see the profits of our trade snatched from us, to enrich our enemies and persecutors. That unequalled spirit of enterprise . . . an inexhaustible mine of national wealth, would be stifled and lost; and poverty and disgrace would overspread a country, which, with wisdom, might make herself the admiration and envy of the world.”

“Passivity manifests in complaining and blaming because these behaviors are both self-focused and correlate to feelings of helplessness. These people are likely to make frequent complaints with the accompanying message that no one will do anything about them and make demands to mobilize feelings of guilt and responsibility in those around them. Their pain is, they tell you, the result of someone or something else outside of themselves (e.g., “You make me sad”; “All this noise makes me feel anxious”). This is not to say that a correlation does not exist, but a complete lack of ownership over one’s emotional state points to a mood disorder because, quite logically, if how we feel is directly determined by an external cause, then we, too, would become anxious and ultimately depressed.”