Apathy Quotes

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

Indifference is an excellent substitute for patience.

Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Se

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"

Indifference creates an artificial peace.

Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Ni

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

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

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 Be

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

Apathy is a sort of living oblivion.

Horace Greeley

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

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

It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don't care.

Pablo Picasso

The worst sin... is... to be indifferent.

George Bernard Shaw

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 ed

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

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

They believe that nothing will happen because they have closed their doors.

Maurice Maeterlinck

The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.

James Thurber

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

Lukewarmness I account a sin, as great in love as in religion.

Abraham Cowley