Indifference Quotes - Page 12

• Conservatives are fond of telling us what a wonderful, happy, prosperous nation this is. The only thing that matches their love of country is the remarkable indifference they show toward the people who live in it.

  Michael Parenti

  Country, People, Political

  Michael Parenti (1996). “Dirty Truths”, p.2, City Lights Books

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• Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.

  Guy Davenport

  Art, Attention, Replacements

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• After that [father's death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.

  Russell Baker

  Pain, Father, Real

  Russell Baker (1984). “Growing up”, Signet

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• ...morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Evil, Suffering, Limits

  Abraham Joshua Heschel, Harold Kasimow (1991). “No Religion Is an Island: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Interreligious Dialogue”, Orbis Books

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• There was an air of indifference about them, a calm produced by the gratification of every passion; and through their manners were suave, one could sense beneath them that special brutality which comes from the habit of breaking down half-hearted resistances that keep one fit and tickle one’s vanity—the handling of blooded horses, the pursuit of loose women.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Horse, Passion, Vanity

  Gustave Flaubert (1993). “Madame Bovary: Patterns of Provincial Life”, Everyman's Library

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• To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

  Joan Didion

  Love, Respect, Self

  Joan Didion (1968). “Slouching towards Bethlehem”

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• He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Heart, People, Bored

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• Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Carpe Diem, Government, Ice

  1936 Renomination acceptance speech, Philadelphia, 27 Jun.

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• But it is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation. I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering. I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in the hut by the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again. The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Baby, Taken, Hands

  J. M. Coetzee (2017). “Waiting for the Barbarians: A Novel”, p.19, Penguin

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• THERE IS NO mystery to happiness. Unhappy men are alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn--or worse, indifference--cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present.

  Jed Rubenfeld

  Pride, Blow, Men

  Jed Rubenfeld (2008). “The Interpretation of Murder”, p.12, Hachette UK

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• No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.

  Charles Lamb

  Marriage, New Year, Years

  Charles Lamb (1840). “The essays of Elia”, p.17

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• The biggest disease today is not leprosy or cancer or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling or being unwanted, uncared for, deserted by everybody. The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference towards one's neighbor who lives at the roadside, the victim of exploitation, corruption, poverty, and disease.

  Mother Teresa

  Women, Cancer, Evil

  Mother Teresa (1987). “My Life for the Poor”

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• There are situations in which hope and fear run together, in which they mutually destroy one another and lose themselves in dull indifference.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Running, Anxiety, Together

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1872). “Elective Affinities: A Novel”, p.173

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• The new idea either finds a champion or it dies. No ordinary involvement with a new idea provides the energy required to cope with the indifference and resistance that change provokes.

  Tom Peters

  Ideas, Champion, Energy

  Tom Peters, Nancy Austin (1985). “A passion for excellence”

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• We are tired of words, of betrayals, of indifference...they years are gone when the farm worker said nothing an did nothing to help himself...Now we have new faith. Through our strong will, our movement is changing these conditions...We shall be heard.

  Cesar Chavez

  Strong, Betrayal, Tired

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• ...the workers aren't going to stop struggling. They're going to struggle to have a union and they have the right to have it. The police repression and the grower indifference to the workers' demands for recognition cannot go unheard so we're going to keep on struggling until we get that recognition.

  Cesar Chavez

  Struggle, Police, Demand

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• It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

  Anatole France

  Life, Nature, Believe

  Anatole France (2015). “The Revolt of the Angels: Works by France”, p.130, 谷月社

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• PROPERTY, n. Any material thing, having no particular value, that may be held by A against the cupidity of B. Whatever gratifies the passion for possession in one and disappoints it in all others. The object of man's brief rapacity and long indifference.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Sarcastic, Passion, Men

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.189, University of Georgia Press

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• Nothing is indifferent, nothing is powerless in the universe; an atom might destroy everything, an atom might save everything!

  Gerard De Nerval

  Science, Atoms, Might

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• What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior... jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.

  Florence Nightingale

  Selfish, War, Nursing

  Florence Nightingale (2001). “The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale”

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• Every class of society has its cant of lamentation, which is understood or regarded by none but themselves; and every part of life has its uneasiness, which those who do not feel them will not commiserate. An event which spreads distraction over half the commercial world, assembles the trading companies in councils and committees, and shakes the nerves of a thousand stockjobbers, is read by the landlord and the farmer with frigid indifference.

  Samuel Johnson

  Class, Humanity, Half

  Samuel Johnson (1836). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.: D., with an Essay on His Life and Genius”, p.200

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• So long as I am acting from duty and conviction, I am indifferent to taunts and jeers. I think they will probably do me more good than harm.

  Winston Churchill

  Courage, Thinking, Long

  Winston Churchill (1949). “The Sinews of Peace: Post-war Speeches”

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• If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that even were the order intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind. But the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilization in little.

  Herbert Spencer

  Children, Knowledge, Science

  Herbert Spencer (1914). “Essays on education and kindred subjects Repr”

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• It is unreasonable to expect science to produce a system of ethics-ethics are a kind of highway code for traffic among mankind-and the fact that in physics atoms which were yesterday assumed to be square are now assumed to be round is exploited with unjustified tendentiousness by all who are hungry for faith; so long as physics extends our dominion over nature, these changes ought to be a matter of complete indifference to you.

  Sigmund Freud

  Science, Yesterday, Squares

  Sigmund Freud, Oskar Pfister (1963). “Psycho-analysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud & Oskar Pfister”

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• If I were entering adulthood now instead of in the environment of fifty years ago, I would choose a career that kept me in touch with nature more than science. ... Too few natural areas remain; both by intent and by indifference we have insulated ourselves from the wilderness that produced us.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Nature, Science, Years

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