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Quote by J.B. Priestley

“Nowadays, it is true, we have mass media and expert propaganda to spread suspicion and fear. But the people I mean—and they form the great majority—are not suspicious and fearful, as many educated and more influential persons are. Propaganda has not made them accept the Bomb. We protesters, though we may have won over some of their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, have not made them reject it. They remain profoundly, astonishingly, shockingly indifferent.”

Quote by J.B. Priestley

Book:Man and Time
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Man and Time

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J.B. Priestley

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“God is so cruel," she murmured reflectively, as though answering him. "Yes," he admitted, from the vantage point of going blind. "Though maybe people are kinder if He made them that way." "You've run with a different crowd. Rich people are nicer to rich people." "Sure. Yes. That's why I've washed up here. Rich people couldn't have been nicer to me.”

CrueltyIndifferenceDisabilityBlindnessMan Is Wolf To ManThrowaway People
Book:In the Country of the Blind
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“Never to feel his own feelings sincerely, and to rise his pallid triumph to the point of regarding his own ambitions, longings and desires with indifference; to pass alongside his joys anxieties as if passing by someone who doesn't interest him … The greatest self-mastery is to be indifferent towards ourselves, to see our body and soul as merely the house and grounds where Destiny willed that we spend our life. To treat our own dreams and deepest desires with arrogance, en grand seigneur, politely and carefully ignoring them. To act modestly in our own presence; to realize that we are never truly alone, since we are our own witnesses, and should therefore act before ourselves as before a stranger, with a studied and serene outward manner – indifferent because it's noble, and cold because it's indifferent. In order not to sink in our own estimation, all we have to do is quit having ambitions, passions, desires, hopes, whims or nervous disquiet. The key is to remember that we're always in our presence – we are never so alone that we can feel at ease. With this in mind, we will overcome having passions and ambitions, for this make us vulnerable; we won't have desires or hopes, since desires and hopes are plebeian and inelegant; and we won't have whims or be disquieted, because rash behavior is unpleasant for others to witness, and agitated behaviors is always a vulgarity. The aristocrat is the one who never forgets that he's never alone, that's why etiquette and decorum are the privilege of aristocrats. Let take him out of his gardens and drawing rooms and place him in our soul and in our consciousness of existing. Let's always treat ourselves with etiquette and decorum, with studied and for-other-people gestures. Each of us is an entire community, an entire neighborhood of the great Mystery, and we should at least make sure that the life of our neighborhood is distinctive and elegant, that the feasts of our sensations are genteel and restrained, and that the banquets of our thoughts are decorous and dignified. Since other souls may build poor and filthy neighborhoods around us, we should clearly define where our begins and ends, and from the facades of our feelings to the alcoves of our shyness, everything should be noble and serene, sculpted in sobriety, without ostentation. We should try to find a serene way to realize each sensation. To reduce love to the shadow of a dream of love, a pale and tremulous interval between the crests of two tint, moonlit waves. To turn desire into a useless and innocuous thing, a kind of knowing smile in our soul; to make it into something we never dream of achieving or even expressing. To lull hearted to sleep like a captive snake, and to tell fear to give up all its outer manifestations except for anguish in our eyes, or rather, in our eyes of soul, for only this attitude can be considered aesthetic.”

Indifference
Author:Pessoa Fernando
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