For twenty years he has held a season ticket on the line of least resistance and has gone wherever the train of events has carried him, lucidly justifying his position at whatever point he happened to find himself.

-Amery, Leo(pold) Charles Maurice Stennett
  Of Herbert  Asquith, in Quarterly Review,  Jul.

Atfifteenlifehadtaught meundeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

-Angelou, Maya originally MayaJohnson
  I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, ch.31.

  All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.

-Burke, Edmund
  On Conciliation with  America.

I should say that Rossetti was a manwithout principles at all, who earnestlydesiredtofindsalvationalong thelines of least resistance.

-Ford, Ford Madox originally Ford Hermann Hueffer
  Of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Memories and Impressions.

Nos deux passions favorites, la gloire de la de¤  fense et le plaisir de la de¤  faite. The gloryof theresistanceand the pleasure of the defeat are our two favourite passions.

-Laclos, Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de
  Les Liaisons dangereuses, letter10.

I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them, and in which, in my belief, they would not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people.

-Law, (Andrew) Bonar
  During the Irish Home Rule crisis, 27  Jul.

Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.

-Melville, Herman
  'Bartleby the Scrivener', in Putnam's Monthly Magazine, Nov^Dec.

The moment you praise a book too highly you waken a resistance in your listener.

-Miller, Henry Valentine
  The Books in My Life.

I thought using the Ayatollah's money to support the Nicaraguan resistance†was a neat idea.

-North, Oliver
   Testimony at the House Committee investigating arms sales to Iran, 8  Jul.

You see how when rivers are swollen in winter those trees that yield to the flood retain their branches, but those that offer resistance perish, trunk and all.

-Sophocles
Haemon speaking. Antigone,712^14 (translated by H Lloyd- Jones,1994).

It would seem that Americans have a kind of resistance to looking closelyat society.

-Trillin, Calvin Marshall
  The Liberal Imagination,'Manners, Morals and the Novel'.