Quotes about indifference

It was not possible for us nor did we want to become islands; the just (i giusti) among us, neither more nor less numerous than in any other human group, felt remorse, shame and pain for the misdeeds that others and not they had committed, and in which they felt involved, because they sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species — we, in short — had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.

Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.

His cold politeness, his ceremonious grace, were worse than anything.

The ancient dream of man to fly among the stars and go through the could and look down on the lands and seas has degenerated in its realization to the socialized and apathetic behavior of passengers who hardly look out the windows.

"The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria..."

I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.

I have much to say about the world, but every year the compulsion dwindles. Let them live and die; it is all one to me.

A detached attitude toward the problems of others is not illegal.

No one paid any attention to them. Perhaps they saw nothing at all. Perhaps they saw what their minds were instructed to see, because the human brain is not equipped to see War, Famine, Pollution, and Death when they don't want to be seen, and has got so good at not seeing that it often manages not to see them even when they abound on every side.

“Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.”

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return . . .

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!