Indifference Quotes - Page 26

• And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

  Barack Obama

  Suffering, Borders, World

  First Presidential Inaugural Address, Delivered 20 January 2009

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• Anger is a more noble emotion than indifference.

  Terry Rossio

  Noble, Emotion

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• Our American heritage is threatened as much by our own indifference as it is by the most unscrupulous office or by the most powerful foreign threat. The future of this republic is in the hands of the American voter.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Powerful, Hands, Office

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• We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly - the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape.

  William James

  Fighting, Attachment, Athletic

  William James (2015). “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature”, p.124, Xist Publishing

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• Indifference to all the refinements of life--it's really shocking. Just Calvinism, that's all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin's theology.

  Aldous Huxley

  Luxury, Reform, Excuse

  Aldous Huxley (1953). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

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• Fifteen years of skepticism has done more for me than 20 years of force-fed religion and 30 years of indifference in between.

  Victor J. Stenger

  Years, Atheism, Done

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• Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race. Confucius cares not for the poverty, squalor and misery of the people of China. Buddha remains undisturbed in his philosophical indifference to the famine and starvation of outraged Hindoos; Jahve continues deaf to the bitter cry of Israel; while Jesus refuses to rise from the dead against his Christians who are butchering each other.

  Emma Goldman

  Christian, Jesus, Philosophical

  Emma Goldman (1915). “Mother Earth, a Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Social Science and Literature”

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• Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism [sic] and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.

  George Eliot

  Commitment, Waiting, Quality

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• The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Indifference creates evil. Hatred is evil itself. Indifference is what allows evil to be strong, what gives it power.

  Elie Wiesel

  Strong, Hate, Love Is

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• Sovereignty is easily preserved by the very arts by which it was originally created. When, however, energy has given place to indifference, and temperance and justice to passion and arrogance, then as the morals change so changes fortune.

  Sallust

  Art, Passion, Government

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• I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each shall stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Lying, Opportunity, Two

  Rainer Maria Rilke (1960). “Selected letters”

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• Indifference to one's own faith is no proof of tolerance. Loyalty to one's own is part of a larger loyalty to faith generally.

  Abba Hillel Silver

  Loyalty, Tolerance, Proof

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• Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Peace, Soul, Opinion

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook E 11, 1799.

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• In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes.... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year.... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law.... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  Children, Work, Animal

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• Nothing is so important to man as his own state; nothing is so formidable to him as eternity. And thus it is unnatural that thereshould be men indifferent to the loss of their existence and to the perils of everlasting suffering.

  Blaise Pascal

  Death, Loss, Men

  Blaise Pascal (2013). “Pascal's Pensees”, p.59, Simon and Schuster

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• Gratitude is a fickle thing, indeed. A person taking aim presses the weapon to his chest and cheek, but when he hits, he discardsit with indifference.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Change, Gratitude, Fickle

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• And we may be led, then, upward through more
  Powerful forms of poetry, past columns
  With peeling posters on them, to the country of indifference.
  Meanwhile if the swell diapasons, blooms
  Unhappily and too soon, the little people are nonetheless real.

  John Ashbery

  Country, Art, Powerful

  John Ashbery (1986). “Selected Poems”

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• As Nature is always careless and indifferent
  Who sees, who steps, means nothing and this is pretty.

  Stevie Smith

  Beauty, Nature, Mean

  Stevie Smith (1988). “New Selected Poems of Stevie Smith”, p.115, New Directions Publishing

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• Fanaticism in many lands has surfaced as the greatest threat to the world. Indifference to its consequences would be a serious mistake.

  Elie Wiesel

  Mistake, Land, Serious

  "The Elevator Interview – Elie Wiesel (Exclusive)". The Algemeiner Interview, www.algemeiner.com. September 23, 2011.

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• The time's come: there's a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up....It's going to blow away all this idleness and indifference, and prejudice against work....I'm going to work, and in twenty-five or thirty years' time every man and woman will be working.

  Anton Chekhov

  Change, Blow, Men

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• From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you.
  To what indifference people may come, to what profound conviction of having lost the right track forever.

  Franz Kafka

  Courage, Adversity, People

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• A conversation in English in Finnish and in French can not be held at the same time nor with indifference ever or after a time.

  Gertrude Stein

  Time, Communication, Conversation

  Gertrude Stein (1952). “The Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein: Mrs. Reynolds, and five earlier novelettes”

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• The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitude towards our equals in age consists in a servile solemnity, overlying a considerable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towards children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Attitude, People

  "The Defendant". Book by G. K. Chesterton, 1901.

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• Out of the element of participation follows the certainty of faith; out of the element of separation follows the doubt in faith. And each is essential for the nature of faith. Sometimes certainty conquers doubt, but it cannot eliminate doubt. The conquered of today may become the conqueror of tomorrow. Sometimes doubt conquers faith, but it still contains faith. Otherwise it would be indifference.

  Paul Tillich

  Faith, Doubt, Essentials

  Paul Tillich (1958). “Dynamics of faith”

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• Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most vaunted, "discovery" of modern public opinion research is the indifference and ignorance of a majority of the electorate in western democracies.

  Moses Finley

  Ignorance, Discovery, Democracy

  Moses I. Finley (1973). “Democracy ancient and modern”

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