Quotes on indifference, aphorisms and thoughts about indifference, unconcern, apathy, insensibility, lack of sensibility, feeling, compassion, in our societies.
The definition of indifference, or unconcern, listlessness, apathy, insensibility, is a lack of interest or concern, that is a state of mind with a strong lack of feeling. Being an indifferent person means being uninterested, unconcerned, lacking compassion, being casual, and/or not caring or taking action in an event that is happening around you.
Some people are just indifferent, some people become indifferent because of the trauma of what has gone on around them in their life, making them use an indifferent attitude or becoming emotionless to cope.
Mental illnesses such as depression or anxiety, use of certain medications, drugs or narcotics, and selfishness are also all causes of being an indifferent person as well.
The world is becoming more and more selfish and very uncaring to the events that are happening in our societies, and this triggers a vicious circle since we are influenced by others, so if we see a lot of people being indifferent or uncaring in the crowd we ourselves are tempted to be the same way.
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.
Elie Wiesel
Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.
Voltaire
Poverty, indifference, abuse, humiliation, all things that shouldn’t exist. We are therefore responsible for every human being who suffers.
Carl William Brown
It is a shame not to do anything under the pretext that we cannot do everything.
Winston Churchill
Indifference holds the key to understanding the reason for evil, because when you believe that something doesn’t affect you, doesn’t concern you, then there is no limit to the horror. The indifferent is complicit. Accomplice to the worst misdeeds.
Liliana Segre
Lukewarmness I account a sin, as great in love as in religion.
Abraham Cowley
Wherever the citizen becomes indifferent to his fellows, so will the husband be to his wife, and the father of a family toward the members of his household.
Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt
I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.
Samuel Johnson
Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
A different world cannot be built by indifferent people.
Peter Marshall
Indifference means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.
Pablo Picasso
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that’s the essence of inhumanity.
George Bernard Shaw
Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.
George Steiner
It’s not the difference between people that’s the difficulty. It’s the indifference.
Author Unknown
To love or hate all things you must know them well; for this reason governments have a considerable interest in ensuring that people know little, and therefore remain indifferent.
Carl William Brown
Only one enemy is worse than despair: indifference. In every area of human creativity, indifference is the enemy; indifference of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile.
Elie Wiesel
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
Elie Wiesel
The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.
Albert Einstein
Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings.
Helen Keller
Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don’t stand a chance against it.
Joan D. Vinge
For those who govern, the first thing required is indifference to newspapers.
Adolphe Thiers
When one becomes indifferent to women, to children, and young people., he may know that he is superannuated, and has withdrawn from whatsoever is sweetest and purest in human existence.
Amos Bronson Alcott
But if the Nazi extermination of five million Jews was a holocaust, what would the indifference of rich countries towards the forty million people who die from malnutrition every year in the world?
Carl William Brown
The Holocaust illustrates the consequences of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on a society. It forces us to examine the responsibilities of citizenship and confront the powerful ramifications of indifference and inaction.
Tim Holden
Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Sometimes the indifference of others can even paralyze us.
Carl William Brown
Indifference is the strongest contempt.
Ha Jin
The pessimist is seldom an agitating individual. His creed breeds indifference to others, and he does not trouble himself to thrust his views upon the unconvinced.
Agnes Repplier
How chronic is the unconcern of men and women of the world!
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.
J. K. Rowling
We live in an age of technology and science that demands proof, and yet we desire mystery. But when God gives us mystery, we seek to destroy it by gross indifference or childish reasoning.
Mother Angelica
The indifference of men, far more than their tyranny, is the torment of women.
Jules Michelet
Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all, the apathy of human beings.
Helen Keller
Indifference is dangerous, whether innocent or not.
Pope Francis
I don’t know, I don’t care, and it doesn’t make any difference!
Albert Einstein
The depreciation of Christianity by indifference is a more insidious and less curable evil than infidelity itself.
Archbishop Richard Whately
In reality there is no cause or effect, there is only the indifference of the universe.
Al Goldstein
If moderation is a fault then indifference is a crime.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Rebellion has its roots in government’s indifference and incompetence.
Mike Barnicle
Only after being sentenced to death was I able to verify my most complete and serene indifference to life.
Carl William Brown
A man’s vanity is more fragile that you might think. It’s easy for us to mistake shyness for coldness, and silence for indifference.
Lisa Kleypas
Indifference may not wreck a man’s life at any one turn, but it will destroy him with a kind of dry-rot in the long run.
William Bliss Carman
The most distressing aspect of the world into which you are going is its indifference to the basic issues, which now, as always, are moral issues.
Robert Maynard Hutchins
Indifference is a misguided way of defending ourselves.
Jack Kornfield
I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
Albert Camus
Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.
Haile Selassie
Ignorance is a matter of laziness, indifference, and apathy.
Tom Tancredo
If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.
Jack Kerouac
Indifference creates an artificial peace.
Mason Cooley
He had opened his heart to the sublime indifference of the universe.
Albert Camus
Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.
Elie Wiesel
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Not the torturer will scare me, nor the body’s final fall, nor the barrels of death’s rifles, nor the shadows on the wall, nor the night when to the ground the last dim star of pain, is hurled but the blind indifference of a merciless, unfeeling world.
Roger Waters
Selfish people, with no heart to speak of, have the best time of it.
Henry Wheeler Shaw
Desire is half of life; indifference is half of death.
Kahlil Gibran
Indifference to the fine arts comes close to barbarism.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel
The great enemy of morality is indifference.
Albert Schweitzer
The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.
George Bernard Shaw
We are born knowing nothing and with much striving we learn but a little; yet all the while we are bound by laws that hearken to no plea of ignorance, and measure out their rewards and punishments with calm indifference.
Paul Elmer More
She knew with painful certainty that the opposite of love was not hate, but indifference.
Susan Wiggs
Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Indifference to all the refinements of lifeit’s really shocking. Just Calvinism, that’s all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin’s theology.
Aldous Huxley
Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another’s heart, or its flame burns low.
Henry Ward Beecher
It would be doing me great injustice to think that I have any feeling of indifference to my country; I have more reason than anyone to feel, every day of my life, the value of the blood which flows in my veins, and it is only from prudence that at times I abstain from showing how proud I am of it.
Marie Antoinette
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.
Cesare Pavese
Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.
Oscar Wilde
Indifferent souls never part. Impassioned souls part, and return to one another, because they can do no better.
Madame Anne Sophie Swetchine
But certainly, for us who understand life, figures are a matter of indifference.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Affection can withstand very severe storms of vigor, but not a long polar frost of indifference.
Walter Scott
Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor, never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten.
Elie Wiesel
She commands who is blest with indifference.
Sebastien-Roch-Nicolas de Chamfort
Until we all start to take responsibility, until we do all we can to improve the character of our communities, we’ll never break the cycle of violence and indifference.
Carrie P. Meek
They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.
Anton Chekhov
There is so much indifference in the face of suffering. May we overcome indifference with concrete acts of charity.
Pope Francis
Careless indifference and bodily restlessness in meditation cause negative vibrations.
Paramahansa Yogananda
Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
Elie Wiesel
Indifference is the dead weight of history.
Antonio Gramsci
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
Robert M. Hutchins
There are many different types of racism from people of different colours and nationalities. There is no vaccine to fight this and no antibiotics to take. It’s a dangerous and infectious virus which is strengthened by indifference and inaction.
Kevin-Prince Boateng
Mme. Deluzy has said that indifference is a woman’s guardian angel,–a remark not only applicable in France, but all over the world.
Anna C. Mowatt
So much violence, so much indifference.
Elie Wiesel
Some scars don’t hurt. Some scars are numb. Some scars rid you of the capacity to feel anything ever again.
Joyce Rachelle
Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?
Bernard Beckett
A lady of fashion will sooner excuse a freedom flowing from admiration than a slight resulting from indifference.
Charles Caleb Colton
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
Desmond Tutu
We win with facts that are well expressed and frequently communicated; we lose with silence and indifference to the broader social context.
Richard Edelman
Indifference is the invincible grant of the world.
Ouida
What is a woman’s surest guardian angel? Indifference.
Dorothee DeLuzy
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
Virginia Woolf
Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.
Thomas Hardy
Of all heavy bodies, the heaviest is the woman we have ceased to love.
Pierre Edouard Lemontey
The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference.
Bess Myerson
Trust him little who praise all, him less who censures all and him least who is indifferent about all.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
