How to Use passive resistance in a Sentence

passive resistance

noun
  • Bringing this up elicits a lot of anger or passive resistance.
    — Tribune Content Agency, Detroit Free Press, 7 Sep. 2022
  • Stephanie Wambugu on lateness as an act of passive resistance.
    — Literary Hub, 1 May 2026
  • Stephanie Wambugu on lateness as an act of passive resistance.
    — Literary Hub, 30 Apr. 2026
  • One is obvious; the body in flight, legs wide, arms behind, daring-do meets passive resistance.
    — Jacob Whitehead, New York Times, 19 Feb. 2026
  • The lawsuit cites an Oregon statute that says a person can’t be arrested for passive resistance.
    — oregonlive, 9 July 2020
  • And the Americans have offered nothing more than passive resistance.
    — Ian O'Connor, New York Times, 28 Sep. 2025
  • This is actually one of the themes of the book – that nonviolent resistance is not passive resistance.
    — Anna Mulrine Grobe, The Christian Science Monitor, 5 Oct. 2022
  • At the level of passive resistance, teens appear sullen, withdrawn or unresponsive.
    — Mark Travers, Forbes.com, 16 July 2025
  • People made a choice between, basically, going into exile or passive resistance on the one hand and going to jail on the other.
    — Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, 23 Sep. 2022
  • Envy between peers becomes passive resistance.
    — Chris Schembra, Rolling Stone, 24 Nov. 2025
  • Most switch freely between the two, which are linguistically similar, and many are speaking Ukrainian as a form of passive resistance.
    — James Marson, WSJ, 7 Mar. 2022
  • Some people tend to perceive new technology and changed processes as a threat to their status quo and subsequently push back or engage in passive resistance.
    — Peter Bendor-Samuel, Forbes, 11 Oct. 2022
  • The judge also ordered no use of pepper spray against people engaged in passive resistance and urged police to minimize the exposure of pepper spray to bystanders.
    — oregonlive, 17 Mar. 2021
  • And with facial recognition capabilities on the horizon, there’s a compelling argument to be made for less-than-passive resistance to the sleazy new devices.
    — Joe Wilkins, Futurism, 25 Feb. 2026
  • Lying flat and involution are not just online fodder, experts say; symptoms of passive resistance are popping up across Chinese society.
    — Grady McGregor, Fortune, 29 Aug. 2022
  • The judge issued an order June 26 that restricted police from firing less-lethal launchers into a crowd if people engaged in passive resistance were likely to be struck.
    — oregonlive, 22 Oct. 2020
  • That led to passive resistance by Germans that tanked the country’s economy and helped trigger hyperinflation in 1923.
    — Cyrus Veeser / Made By History, TIME, 10 Sep. 2024
  • High-level supervisors should be held accountable for allowing force used against protesters when there was only passive resistance by a particular demonstrator, Hager said.
    — oregonlive, 16 July 2021
  • At best, that approach creates minimal performance and comes with significant collateral damage from passive resistance to outright sabotage.
    — Rodger Dean Duncan, Forbes, 3 May 2022
  • The training will include review of videos and scenarios from protests in Portland and elsewhere to ensure police understand the difference between a person’s passive resistance, physical resistance and active aggression.
    — oregonlive, 13 Jan. 2021
  • Yet even if the remaining Ukrainians refrained from active and passive resistance and sought to live peacefully, work productively, and pay their taxes in full, there are simply not enough of them to contribute meaningfully to the Russian economy.
    — Andrew Kosenko, Foreign Affairs, 5 Feb. 2025
  • When the Selma marchers faced down snarling dogs and baton-wielding police in 1965, the contrast between their passive resistance and the Jim Crow officials’ savagery echoed the caning of a century before.
    — Rob Wolfe, The Atlantic, 5 June 2026
  • The informal nature of his directives has practically invited passive resistance, such as when the service chiefs and his own secretary of defense politely ignored his tweet about banning transgender individuals from serving in the military.
    — Eliot A. Cohen, Foreign Affairs, 20 Jan. 2018
  • Police used force during last year’s mass protests that violated bureau policy, with officers not distinguishing between active versus passive resistance before firing rubber bullets and other impact munitions, federal lawyers said.
    — oregonlive, 24 Mar. 2021
  • The efforts of Xi Jinping, the president, to make local leaders obey the dictates of the central government seem to have turned the former passive resistance at the lower levels of the bureaucracy into overenthusiastic compliance.
    — The Economist, 14 Dec. 2017
  • Behavioral Challenges And Manipulation Collaboration is vital to influence, but disruptive behaviors, such as manipulation or passive resistance, often go unchecked when authority is absent.
    — Chaitra Vedullapalli, Forbes, 22 Jan. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'passive resistance.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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