Callousness Quotes

• The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit.

  Albert Einstein

  Compassion, Animal, Vegetarianism

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• Behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair.

  John Bowlby

  Despair, Misery, Indifference

  John Bowlby (1946). “Forty-four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home-life : [With Bibl.].”

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• An artist who is too self-centered is liable to exhibit faults he abhors: carelessness, callousness, and even downright cruelty.

  Eric Maisel

  Artist, Self, Ego

  Eric Maisel (1996). “Affirmations for Artists”, Tarcher

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• War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder.

  Alexander Berkman

  Peace, War, Stupid

  Alexander Berkman (2010). “Now and After: the ABC of Anarchist Communism”, p.30, Lulu.com

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• Perhaps the greatest rudenesses of our time come not from the callousness of strangers, but from the solicitousness of intimates who believe that their frank criticisms are always welcome, and who feel free to "be themselves" with those they love, which turns out to mean being their worst selves, while saving their best behavior for strangers.

  Judith Martin

  Friendship, Believe, Mean

  Judith Martin (1996). “Common courtesy: in which Miss Manners solves the problem that baffled Mr. Jefferson”

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• Death and its associates, after the initial shock, produce callousness.

  R.K. Narayan

  Produce, Shock, Initials

  R. K. Narayan (2009). “Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher”, p.517, Everyman's Library

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• War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood.

  Alexander Berkman

  Peace, War, Spirit

  Alexander Berkman (2010). “Now and After: the ABC of Anarchist Communism”, p.30, Lulu.com

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• One of the bitter ironies of the 20th century was that communism, which began as an egalitarian doctrine accusing capitalism of selfishness and calloused sacrifices of others, became in power a system whose selfishness and callousness toward others made the sins of capitalism pale.

  Thomas Sowell

  Sacrifice, Selfishness, Doctrine

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• All education should be directed toward the refinement of the individual's sensibilities in relation not only to one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all living things whatsoever.

  Ashley Montagu

  Life, Education, Equality

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• Ebola haunted Zaire because of corruption and political repression. The virus had no secret powers, nor was it unusually contagious. For centuries Ebola had lurked in the jungles of central Africa. Its emergence into human populations required the special assistance of humanity's greatest vices : greed, corruption, arrogance, tyranny, and callousness.

  Laurie Garrett

  Ebola, Greed, Political

  Laurie Garrett (2003). “Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health”, p.53

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• The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit. All education should be directed toward the refinement of the individual's sensibilities in relation not only to one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all things whatsoever.

  Ashley Montagu

  Animal, People, Evil

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• The assurance that we have no means of answering [final] questions is no valid excuse for callousness towards them. The more deeply should we feel, down to the roots of our being, their pressure and their sting. Whose hunger has ever been [sated] with the knowledge that he could not eat?

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Mean, Roots, Finals

  "History as a System". Book by Jose Ortega y Gasset, 1962.

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• It seems to me of great importance to teach children respect for life. Towards this end, experiments on living animals in classrooms should be stopped. To encourage cruelty in the name of science can only destroy the finer emotions of affection and sympathy, and breed an unfeeling callousness in the young towards suffering in all living creatures.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Respect, Nature, Children

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• It seems to me of great importance to teach children respect for life.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Respect, Children, Abuse

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• Callousness and insolence bring to bare unanimous social condemnation, while the simple efforts of politeness are admired; even in those who are otherwise despised.

  Bryant H. McGill

  Simple, Effort, Social

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• The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

  Adrienne Rich

  Mother, Children, War

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

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• If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Inspirational, Life, God

  H. P. Lovecraft (2014). “The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft”, p.123, Race Point Publishing

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• The death of American liberalism as a significant moral force can be traced to the point in when President Bill Clinton signed legislation that effectively ended the main federal anti-poverty program and turned the fate of welfare recipients, 70 percent of whom were children, over to the tender mercies of the states. With a stroke of the pen, Clinton eliminated what remained of New Deal-era compassion for the poor and codified into law the "tough love" callousness that his Republican allies in the Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, had long embraced.

  Robert Scheer

  Children, Fate, Compassion

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• I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Hate, Night, Vanity

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• I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.

  Margaret Atwood

  Ignorance, Dark, Thinking

  Margaret Atwood (1989). “Cat's Eye”, Bantam

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• when someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colors, which, it seems to him, will always alter depending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum of character. For him they are the most intricate aspect of faces. He's never sure what an eye reveals. but he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge an eye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Character, Eye, Simple

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• An increasing number of people are growing uncomfortable with the gulf between the world's rich and the poor. Ostentatiously splashing your money around simply draws attention to that disparity, and to your own position on the lucky higher ground. It suggests a callousness, an inhumanity, a let's-just-rub-their-noses-in-it arrogance.

  Kalle Lasn

  Higher Ground, Numbers, People

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• A medical profession founded on callousness to the pain of the other animals may eventually destroy its own sensibility to the pain of humans.

  Brigid Brophy

  Pain, Animal, May

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• Lies, injustice, and hypocrisy are a part of every ordinary community. Most people achieve a sort of protective immunity, a kind of callousness, toward them. If they didn't, they couldn't endure.

  Nella Larsen

  Lying, People, Hypocrisy

  Nella Larsen (2014). “Quicksand & Passing”, p.27, Serpent's Tail

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• War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood. It degrades and stupefies with the sense that you are not responsible, that 'tis not yours to think and reason why, but to do and die,' like the hundred thousand others doomed like yourself. War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder.

  Alexander Berkman

  Peace, War, Mean

  Alexander Berkman (2010). “Now and After: the ABC of Anarchist Communism”, p.30, Lulu.com

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