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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
-Walter Benjamin
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I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate -- it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.
-Leo Buscaglia
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Scientists announced today that they have discovered a cure for apathy. However, they claim no one has shown the slightest interest in it.
-George Carlin
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Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie, but rather mourn the apathetic, throng the coward and the meek who see the world's great anguish and its wrong, and dare not speak.
-Ralph Chaplin
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Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie
Dust unto dust
The calm, sweet earth that mothers all who die
As all men must;
Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell
Too strong to strive
Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell,
Buried alive;
But rather mourn the apathetic throng
The cowed and the meek
Who see the world's great anguish and its wrong
And dare not speak!
-Ralph Chaplin, Mourn Not the Dead
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Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
-John Jay Chapman
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Wherever there is degeneration and apathy, there also is sexual perversion, cold depravity, miscarriage, premature old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, and injustice in all its forms.
-Anton Chekhov, Letter, to his editor and friend, A.S. Suvorin., December 27, 1889
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Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.
-Frederic Chopin
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Indifference creates an artificial peace.
-Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Ninth Selection, New York, 1992
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Indifference is an excellent substitute for patience.
-Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Second Selection, New York, 1985
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Lukewarmness I account a sin, as great in love as in religion.
-Abraham Cowley
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Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.
-John Dos Passos, The Prospect Before Us,, 1950
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Indifference is harder to fight than hostility, and there is nothing that kills an agitation like having everybody admit that it is fundamentally right.
-Crystal Eastman, "Time and Tide", July 20, 1923
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The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
-Albert Einstein
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Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn
-William Feather
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God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets of nature to us: we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and boredom.
-Johann von Goethe, source cited: Memoirs, by Riemer
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Apathy is a sort of living oblivion.
-Horace Greeley
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The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life but that it bothers him less and less.
-Vaclav Havel
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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
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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 Maynard Hutchins
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Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
-Aldous Huxley
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Everything proceeds as if of its own accord, and this can all too easily tempt us to relax and let things take their course without troubling over details. Such indifference is the root of all evil.
-I Ching
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People are people, and grief that is limited to those within a specific political boundary denies the humanity of others.
-Robert Jensen
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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
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We 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
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Laws can embody standards; governments can enforce laws--but the final task is not a task for government. It is a task for each and every one of us. Every time we turn our heads the other way when we see the law flouted--when we tolerate what we know to be wrong--when we close our eyes and ears to the corrupt because we are too busy, or too frightened--when we fail to speak up and speak out--we strike a blow against freedom and decency and justice.
-Robert Francis Kennedy
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I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference!
-Jack Kerouac
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Bad people are less a problem than indifferent people.
-Gerhard Kocher
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Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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You see few people here in America who really care very much about living a Christian life in a democratic world.
-Clare Boothe Luce
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They believe that nothing will happen because they have closed their doors.
-Maurice Maeterlinck
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America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.
-Norman Mailer
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A different world cannot be built by indifferent people.
-Peter Marshall
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There is nothing harder than the softness of indifference.
-Juan Montalvo
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They act as if they supposed that to be very sanguine about the general improvement of mankind is a virtue that relieves them from taking trouble about any improvement in particular.
-John Morley
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By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy - indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction.
-William Osler
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I shall stay the way I am because I do not give a damn.
-Dorothy Parker
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Pain has its reasons, pleasure is totally indifferent.
-Francis Picabia
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It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don't care.
-Pablo Picasso
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The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
-Plato
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In lazy apathy let stoics boast
Their virtue fix
-Alexander Pope, Essay on Man. Epistle ii. Line 101.
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A university professor set an examination question in which he asked what is the difference between ignorance and apathy. The professor had to give an A+ to a student who answered: I dont know and I dont care.
-Richard Pratt
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The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.
-David Sarnoff
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The worst sin... is... to be indifferent.
-George Bernard Shaw
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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
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Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.
-George Steiner
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Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand.
-Bodie Thoene
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The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
-James Thurber
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I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all for fear of being carried off their feet. The prospect really does frighten me that they may finally become so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures that their interest in their own future and in that of their descendants may vanish, and that they will prefer tamely to follow the course of their destiny rather than make a sudden energetic effort necessary to set things right.
-Alexis de Tocqueville
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A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally both in mind and body as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world and therefore, as an Englishman, always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth -- science -- which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.
-Leo Tolstoy
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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
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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
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Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.
-Virginia Woolf
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Books about Apathy
