Quotes about indifference

He didn’t care what she thought, and, in not caring, he felt as if a curse were lifted from his back.

That was something else war was about: not caring.

For the true author of the subjugation of a people is not so much the immediate agent, as the power which permits it having the means to prevent it.

How can I accept that disaster has overtaken my life when the world continues to move so tranquilly through its cycles?

"Down there," he said, "are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no." (p. 337)

[Romeo ... transfers his affections from Rosalind to Juliet] 'A lover, my dear Lady Betty,' said Flora, 'may, I conceive, persevere in his suit, under very discouraging circumstances. Affection can (now and then) withstand very severe storms of rigour, but not a long polar frost of downright indifference. Don't, even with your attractions, try the experiment upon any lover whose faith you value. Love will subsist on wonderfully little hope, but not altogether without it.'

How nice — to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive. (p. 105)

'Course I care. I always care. But there's no point in making a song and dance about it, like that night he stayed here. Know something? There's only one thing that'll bring 'em back, and that's indifference. The one thing you can't fake.'

I don’t think the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has much chance of actually affecting the government. It’s one of the first things you have to face up to. But we do it to keep our self-respect to show to ourselves, each one to himself or herself, that we care. And to let other people, all the lazy, sulky, hopeless ones like you, know that someone cares. We’re trying to shame you into thinking about it, about acting.

Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?

Failing to try and stop a murder that you might easily stop — how is that not murder?

So without an original or helpful thought in my head, I just sat for some minutes and watched these poor disconnected people shuffle past. Then I did what most white Australians do. I read my newspaper and drank my coffee and didn't see them anymore.