Top 1000 Popular Quotes
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“If the attempt to get rid of something is leading you towards more darkness, that thing has become your shadow. Just accept it. First it will stop bothering you, then it will stop affecting you, then it will stop existing for you.”
“If you are not ready to die fighting an injustice, your loved ones will die everyday because of that injustice.”
Source: No Foreigner Only Family
“Break your silence and the tyrants will wet themselves.”
Source: No Foreigner Only Family
“You can’t turn love on and off like a light switch, no matter how hard you try. All you can do is wall it off, one brick at a time, until you’ve created an impenetrable fortress around your emotions. And once that fortress is built, you camouflage it so well that even you can’t see it anymore.”
Source: The Sweet Gum Tree
“There are essentially two different philosophies at play in our politics: one that says, we are all in this together, let's help each other; and the other that says, I got mine, you are on your own. One is compassionate; the other is indifferent to the suffering of others.”
Source: The One Idea That Saves The World: A Message of Hope in a Time of Crisis
“All these indifferent passions, or passions born of indifference, all these negative passions, culminate in hatred. A strange expression: `I've got the hate' [J'ai la haine]. No object. It is like `I'm demonstrating', but for whom, for what? `I take responsibility' [J'assume], but for what? Nothing in particular. One perhaps takes responsibility precisely for the nothing. One demonstrates for or against the nothing -- how are we to know? This is the fate of all these intransitive verbs. The graffiti said: `I exist', `I live at this particular place'. This was stated with a kind of exultation, yet at the same time it said: `There is no meaning to my life'. Similarly, `I've got the hate' says at the same time: `This hate I have has no object'; `There's no meaning to it'. Hatred is doubtless something which does indeed outlive any definable object, and feeds on the disappearance of that object. Who are we to take against today? There, precisely, is the object: the absent other of hatred. `Having' hatred is like a sort of potential of -- negative and reactive -- energy, but energy all the same. These are, indeed, the only passions we have today: hatred, disgust, allergy, aversion, rejection and disaffection. We no longer know what we want, but we know what we don't want. In its pure expression of rejection, it is a non-negotiable, irremediable passion. Yet there is in it something like an invitation to the absent other to offer himself as an object for that hatred.
The dream of hatred is to give rise to a heartfelt enmity, which is scarcely available at all in our world now, as all conflicts are immediately contained. Over against the hatred born of rivalry and conflict there is a hatred born of accumulated indifference which can suddenly crystallize in an extreme physical outburst. We are not speaking of class hatred now, which, paradoxically, remained a bourgeois passion. That had a target, and was the driving force behind historical action. This hatred is externalized only in episodes of `acting-out'. It does not give rise to historical violence, but to a virulence born of disaffection with politics and history. In this sense, it is the characteristic passion not of the end of history but of a history without end, a history which is a dead-end, since there has been no resolution of all the problems it posed. It is possible that beyond the end, in those reaches where things turn around, there is room for an indeterminate passion, where what remains of energy also turns around, like time, into a negative passion.”
Source: The Perfect Crime
“There’s nothing the dead can tell you that the living can’t,” he’d said to me. “World is indifferent to your feelings. World has no responsibility and no reasons why a serial killer can randomly create orphans and then disappear, and no antipathy for assholes who get drunk and kill, then go free a couple of years later. You gotta look for joy, not reasons and explanations.”
Source: Tied Within
“Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!”
Source: Moby Dick
“The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss
or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news,
the fitful events;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.”
“Determination designs destiny, indifference invites doom.”
Source: No Foreigner Only Family
“The stronger you cling to your armor of indifference, the more it strips you of your humanity.”
Source: No Foreigner Only Family
“Roar with conscience wherever you see inhumanity, and whenever someone even dreams of acting inhuman, one thought will haunt them day and night - don't you dare being inhuman, or else the ravager will come.”
Source: No Foreigner Only Family
“Open your eyes o mighty lords of time, and cleanse this world of all barbarian impurities, with the force of your bold, brave and humane actions.”
Source: All For Acceptance
“Differences don't make a society fall, indifference does.”
Source: Hurricane Humans: Give me accountability, I'll give you peace
“No unfree country has ever been freed through indifference.”
Source: Hurricane Humans: Give me accountability, I'll give you peace
“Indifference suits roaches, not humans.”
Source: Ain't Enough to Look Human
“Evolution is predicated on action, inaction leads to extinction.”
Source: Ain't Enough to Look Human
“Indifference is modern cannibalism.”
Source: Servitude is Sanctitude
“Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of j am. We wouldn't like jam if it didn't, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldn't like truth if it wasn't sticky, if, from time to time, it didn't ooze blood.
Verifying to the point of dizziness the useless objectivity of things: science. Verifying to the point of dizziness the useless subjectivity of desire: sexual libera tion. An object in which there is nothing to see. A body in which there is nothing to desire.
There is a particular grace in indifference to one's own life and the admission of that indifference is touching, just so long as you are told with tenderness: I am incapable of loving you, rather than being told 'I love you', with all the affectation appropriate to such a statement. There are indeed certain women who can only love in proportion to the degree of boredom they feel with themselves: with them, above all you must not bring them out of their boredom. There is, however, a great difference between real and affected indifference: only the former touches us. But it is very rare, almost as rare as beauty or madness.”
Source: Cool memories
“All the imaginaries of breakup are fading. Children finding it impossible to leave their families. It's the same with couples. They no longer split up. Why bother? Things are just the same everywhere else. You just negotiate your mutual indifference. It's the same with the political situation. Whatever the government, no one's keen to change it, since every alternative illusion is dead. Thus the politi cal relationship has got itself into the same conjugal neurosis as the couple or the rising generation. The price to be paid is that of a low intensity, a scaled-down demand, an air-conditioned intelligence which allows us never to cross the threshold of breakup.”
Source: Cool memories
“A democracy of civilized people practicing indifference is far more savage than a tribe of cannibals, for at least the cannibals do not pretend to be civilized.”
Source: Servitude is Sanctitude
“Five days of life practicing humanity is far more meaningful than fifty years of life practicing indifference.”
Source: Servitude is Sanctitude
“No society is born humane. It has to be made humane.”
Source: Time to End Democracy: The Meritocratic Manifesto
“Sleeping masses make a regressive democracy, whereas thinking masses make a progressive democracy.”
Source: Time to End Democracy: The Meritocratic Manifesto
“Humanizing Democracy (A Sonnet)
Dictatorship is rule of the cunning,
Democracy is rule of the halfwits.
Both are quite degrading for society,
Cause neither of them is born of merits.
Progress requires practice of reason,
Immersed in a whole lot of love.
But when the people prefer indifference,
Society regresses down the savage curve.
Character is the foundation of civilization,
Yet that character is taken for granted.
All talk and no walk has made us shallow,
Separatism has made our soul tainted.
So it’s time we feed values into democracy,
While abolishing all populist fallacy.”
Source: Time to End Democracy: The Meritocratic Manifesto
“When the people prefer indifference, society regresses down the savage curve.”
Source: Time to End Democracy: The Meritocratic Manifesto
“These, too [ideologies], have disappeared. And we survive only by a reflex action of collective credulity, which consists not only in absorbing everything put about under the heading of news or information, but in believing in the principle and transcendence of information. While, at the same time, remaining deeply incredulous and resistant to that kind of knee-jerk consensus. We no more believe in information by divine right than serfs ever believed they were serfs by divine right, but we act as though we do. Behind this façade, a gigantic principle of incredulity is growing up, a principle of secret disaffection and the denial of any social bond.
There is a considerable danger of the inertia threshold being crossed, danger of a potential gravitational collapse by an exceeding of the critical mass, thanks to the absorption by the system of all negative elements: crashes, errors, scandals, conflicts -- everything is absorbed back into it as though by evaporation. All the wastes and disorders are digested and recycled. Maddening metastability which gives rise to a whole range of violent, virulent, destabilizing abreactions, which are the symptom of that collapse.
All our contemporary passions arise from this: objectless, negative passions, all born of indifference, all built (in the absence of a real object) on a virtual other, and thus doomed to crystallize for preference on any old thing at all.”
Source: The Perfect Crime
“Equivocamos esa paz con la muerte
y creemos anhelar nuestro fin
y anhelamos el sueno y la indiferencia.
(We mistake peace for death
and we believe we long for our end
when what we long for is sleep and indifference.)”
Source: Selected poems
“If an act of inhumanity goes unchallenged in your presence, then you have no right to call yourself human.”
Source: Aşkanjali: The Sufi Sermon
“Pain is closer to love than indifference, right?”
Source: Animals Eat Each Other
“The best decisions come from having a clear mind. Having a clear mind comes from being indifferent to what they think.”
“One person's sacrifice makes millions wake up from their sleep of indifference.”
Source: Mad About Humans: World Maker's Almanac
“there are people capable of eating popcorn at the movie of your agony”
Source: rushes from the river disappointment (The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series)
“She had not meant him to translate her words about returning home so literally at the first; she had not intended him to learn her secret; but more than all she was not able to endure the perception of his learning it and continuing unmoved.”
Source: Desperate Remedies
“In the face of mass atrocities, we stand in mass indifference rationalized by logic that sees us through the day.”
“Inflicting harm on another is not the only crime, silently seeing harm inflicted on another is also a crime, and perhaps the latter is more criminal in nature than the former, for keeping silent when another is being wronged is an act of implicit promotion of that wrong without the accountability.”
Source: Aşkanjali: The Sufi Sermon
“Sit still no more, sleep sound no more, eat calmly no more, for the innocent are crying, and you are the only hope they've got.”
Source: Aşkanjali: The Sufi Sermon
“A nation falls not because of governmental atrocity, but because of the citizens' indifference to that atrocity.”
Source: Mad About Humans: World Maker's Almanac
“Inflicting harm on another is not the only crime, silently seeing harm inflicted on another is also a crime.”
“Indifference to snobbery, bigotry and savagery turns them into the norm of a society.”
Source: No Foreigner Only Family
“Silence in front of savagery is savagery itself.”
Source: No Foreigner Only Family
“Action is life, inaction is death.”
Source: Every Generation Needs Caretakers: The Gospel of Patriotism
“What is worse than indifference is when people’s nationalism allows for the conscious rationalisation of brutality as part of a political balance sheet. It is but a grave oversight when people shift their responsibility towards moral values for the duty to obey.”
“It is a mistake always to contemplate the good and ignore the evil, because by making people neglectful it lets in disaster. There is a dangerous optimism of ignorance and indifference.”
Source: Optimism
“Life stops not when breathing stops, life stops when action stops.”
Source: Mad About Humans: World Maker's Almanac
“This is free-market fanaticism, the fanaticism of indifference to its own values and, for that very reason, total intolerance towards those who differ by any passion whatsoever. The New World Order implies the extermination of everything different to integrate it into an indifferent world order. Is there still room between these two fanaticisms for a non-believer to exercise his liberty?”
Source: Fragments
“Plant a sapling even if it's doomsday.”
“Liberationville (The Sonnet)
When the blood is boiling and conscience is screaming,
Stop not wishing for a messiah to appear.
When the heart is beating and the mind is restless,
Sit not praying for the miseries to disappear.
When the veins are burning and nerves are revolting,
Stay not cooped up in a cocoon of petty pleasures.
When the lungs are choking and cells are aching,
Stay not inanimate out of insecurities and fears.
When the spine is bending and the head is drooping,
Stay not silent submitting to tribal identity.
When the knees are trembling and the throat is thirsty,
Stand not frail as servant of conformity.
When the eyes are teary and lips are dreary, never consider sitting still.
Obliterate loyalty to atrocities of the norm waking up to liberationville.”
Source: Mad About Humans: World Maker's Almanac
“When the eyes are teary and lips are dreary, never consider sitting still.
Obliterate loyalty to atrocities of the norm waking up to liberationville.”
Source: Mad About Humans: World Maker's Almanac
“What we require is a balance between protest and stability. This is never easy to obtain but is worth attempting, because we know that if through indifference we lose our liberties we shall not regain them in this century.”
“Ain't no good people we,
If goodness means blindness.
Ain't no practical folks we,
If practicality means selfishness.
Ain't no sane citizens we,
If sanity means indifference.
Ain't no smart bunch we,
If smartness brings arrogance.”
Source: When Call The People: My World My Responsibility
“Whenever savages raise their fangs most appalling,
Be not a mute witness but a revolution sanctifying.”
Source: Revolution Indomable
“On guard we stand against differentiation,
Hear all peddlers of hate – we are all one.”
Source: Revolution Indomable
“Considering silence to be nonviolence is a sign of our downfall, not progress.”
Source: No Foreigner Only Family
“Sadness and joy aren't opposites of each other. They are each the opposite of indifference.”
Source: We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast
“Let me advise you, then, to form the habit to take some of your solitude with you into society, to learn to be to some extent alone even though you are in company; not to say at once what you think, and, on the other hand, not to attach too precise a meaning to what others say; rather, not ot expect much of them, either morally or intellectually, and to strenghten yourself in the feeling of indifference to their opinion, which is the surest way of always practicing a praiseworhty toleration. If you do that, you will not live so much with other people, though you may appear to move amongst them: your relation to them will be of a purely objective character. This precaution will keep you from too close contact with society, and therefore secure you from being contamined or even outraged by it.”
Source: Essays and aphorisms
“With children like this having children of their own, it was no wonder the world was full of children.”
Source: The Emissary
“My soul is callous, it is impassive... I put any sentiment whatever at defiance to attain it, with the exception of pleasure. I am mistress of that soul's movements and affections, of its desires, of its impulsions; with me, everything is under the unchallenged control of mind; and there's worse yet... for my mind is appalling. But I am not complaining, I cherish my vices, I abhor virtue; I am the sworn enemy of all religions, of all gods and godlings, I fear neither the ills of life nor what follows death; and when you're like me, you're happy.”
Source: Juliette
“Much of life must go by without comment.”
“Most Gods don’t care. About anything. Other than gaining dominance over other Gods and telling you how wonderful they are and demanding that you say the same. There’s nothing like a bunch of Gods to show you how alone you really are.”
Source: The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“So the next day we all said, “She will kill herself”; and we said it would be the best thing.”
Source: A Rose for Emily
“In a sentiment of remarkable prescience in the context of climate change denial half a century later, Carson articulated the formidable task before her: It is a great problem to know how to look at unpleasant facts that might have to be dealt with if one recognized their existence.”
Source: Figuring
“While I stand and regard it, the indifference to myself shown by a work of art in itself is art.”
Source: A Time In Rome
“People and things need not be interesting to us for them to be beneficial to us.”
“Wtedy znów Krzyś, który, z podbródkiem opartym na dłoni, dalej patrzył na świat, zawołał nagle: - Puchatku! - Co? - rzekł Puchatek. - A kiedy ja... Puchatku... kiedy ja... - Co, Krzysiu?
- Kiedy już przestanę nic nie robić... - Już zupełnie? - No, w każdym razie nie tak bardzo... Puchatek czekał na dalszy ciąg, lecz Krzyś zamilkł znowu. - Co, Krzysiu? Powiedz! - rzekł Puchatek. - Powiedz, Puchatku, kiedy ja już... rozumiesz... kiedy ja już przestanę nic nie robić, czy będziesz tu czasami przychodził? - Ja? - Tak, Puchatku. - A czy ty też tu będziesz? - Będę, Puchatku, będę naprawdę, przyrzekam ci. - To dobrze - rzekł Puchatek - Puchatku, przyrzeknij mi, że nigdy o mnie nie zapomnisz. Nawet kiedy będę miał sto lat. Puchatek pomyślał troszkę. - A ile lat ja wtedy będę miał? - zapytał. - Dziewięćdziesiąt dziewięć. Puchatek kiwnąłłebkiem. - Przyrzekam - odpowiedział. Z oczyma ciągle zwróconymi na świat Krzyś wyciągnął rękę i poszukałłapki Puchatka. - Puchatku - rzekł Krzyś poważnie - jeśli ja... jeśli ja już nie będę... - tu urwał i zaczął znowu - ty zrozumiesz, prawda? - Co zrozumiem? - Ach, nic! - zaśmiał się Krzyś i zerwał się na nogi. - Chodźmy! - Dokąd? - spytał Puchatek. - Wszystko jedno dokąd - rzekł Krzyś. * * * I poszli, trzymając się za ręce. I dokądkolwiek pójdą i cokolwiek im się zdarzy po drodze, mały chłopczyk i jego Miś będą zawsze bawić się wesoło ze sobą w tym Zaczarowanym Miejscu na skraju Lasu.”
“The gap between 'I should' and 'I want' is too big.”
“Let me advise you, then, to form the habit to take some of your solitude with you into society, to learn to be to some extent alone even though you are in company; not to say at once what you think, and, on the other hand,, not to attach too preceise a meaning to what others say; rather, not ot expect much of them, either morally or intellectually, and to strenghten yourself in the feeling of indifference to their opinion, which is the surest way of always practicing a praiseworhty toleration. If you do that, you will not live so much with other people, though you may appear to move amongst them: your relation to them will be of a purely objective character. This precaution will keep you from too close contact with society, and therefore secure you from being contamined or even outraged by it.”
Source: Essays and aphorisms
“People are suffering, what's that to us! Nation is suffering, what's that to us! Society is suffering, what’s that to us! The world is suffering, what's that to us! Such mentality has shoved our entire human civilization into the abyss of misery.”
Source: When Humans Unite: Making A World Without Borders
“Injustice won't destroy our world, indifference to injustice will.”
Source: Operation Justice: To Make A Society That Needs No Law
“Be not an insect of indifference, be the godzilla of zeal and deeds.”
Source: Operation Justice: To Make A Society That Needs No Law
“one of the most powerful abilities a person can have is not to care what other people think about them.”
Source: "A" is for Actress
“You will find love. Believe me. But in order to find it, I think you have to prepare yourself for a life alone and be at peace with that. It’s a real tightrope walk. I get it. But you won’t tell tepid to fuck off if you don’t believe in your heart that you will rock it out one way or another.”
Source: How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life
“He sat by the fast water, enjoying its speed, its splendid indifference, and its rippling sound, silently observing and wading birds with their shrill curl of beak and voice. He drank deeply of life so that he knew the taste of it here, knew the vibrant wealth of its dominion, knew exactly what he was taking from the man who would die on this ground.”
Source: The Vorrh
“Divest yourself of the dislike you have taken to circumstantial details; I have often told you, and you ought yourself to feel the truth of this remark, that they are as dear to us from those we love, as they are tedious and disagreeable from others. If they are displeasing to us, it is only from the indifference we feel for those who write them.”
Source: The Letters of Madame De Sevigne to Her Daughter and Friends
“[Alfred Jarry] neither wished nor was able to adapt himself to the world as it was. He ignored the conventions of life, and even the conditions of life. He refused to compromise with something for which he felt nothing but scorn, and he accepted with indifference the logical consequences of his attitude—that life should destroy him, and much sooner than most.”
“Neutralność zwykle bywa podła.”
Source: Czas pogardy
“Irony is that indifference is the most easily learned attitude.”
“Cruelly exploiting and slaughtering human beings is widely recognized as spiritually problematic, but the veal industry is not, battery cages are not, foie gras and the use of farrowing crates are not, debeaking and slaughter lines are not. How can this be? Anymal suffering is extreme on factory farms, massive numbers of premature deaths are the expected end, and both are sanctioned not only by the government but also by the masses—including those who affiliate with a particular religious tradition and take their religious commitments seriously. The reason for this cruelty and indifference is obvious: With human beings creating the rules, anymals are the last to be noticed and the most likely to be discarded or exploited. Consequently, wherever humanity suffers, anymals suffer yet more.”
Source: Animals and World Religions
“M. Honoré is coming down the staircase. He holds himself straight and stiff, his cane under his arm. He does not look at Monsieur Karl, but through him. And every time Monsieur Karl feels humiliated. He wouldn't mind being hated: but he doesn't want to be ignored. He has the impression that he no longer exists, while this cracked Frenchman is going past.”
Source: Forest of Anger
“Men are shit. She has known this since Percy, who took her virginity on the sand dunes at Santa Cruz but never called her back for a third date. Since Jean-Claude, who let her fly from the country she loved and back to the one she hated, without ever thinking to follow. Since Lenny Lynden, who accepted Terra as her replacement as easily as pancakes instead of French toast. For as long as she has been a woman, Evelyn has understood the fundamental indifference of men.”
Source: Beautiful Revolutionary
“Let us not still our anger against indifference and inattention and let us not glitziness, superciliousness and mumbo jumbo slither into our thinking and our actions, if we don’t want our conscience to be backfired on. (“Twilight of desire”)”
“When love gets on a slippery slope, unawareness or indifference might be the underpinning of disenchantment and falling out of love. (“Amour en friche”)”
“Forgive my indifference; I'd rather be distant than devastated.”
“The real question I am asking here is the one Marcuse asked in the sixties. How does a way of life break down? How does it break down. And Marcuse doesn’t give the pat Marxist answer, which means economically, and we ought to be glad that that pat Marxist answer is false because if a society could be driven to ruin by debt, you know, the way a lot of people said the Russians – the Soviet Union – fell because it was broke. Let’s hope that’s not true [laughs] since we are broke, let’s hope that’s false. As a generalisation, we had better hope it is false.
How do they break down? Well, here there is an analogy – for me – between the social and the self under siege, in many ways. In many ways, not in a few, and some of the symptoms we see around us that our own lives are breaking down and the lives of our society is a generalised cynicism and scepticism about everything. I don’t know how to characterise this situation, I find no parallel to it in human history. The scepticism and cynicism about everything is so general, and I think it’s partly due to this thing I call banalisation, and it’s partly due to the refusal and the fear of dealing with complexity. Much easier to be a cynic than to deal with complexity. Better to say everything is bullshit than to try to look into enough things to know where you are. Better to say everything is just… silly, or pointless, than to try to look into systems of this kind of complexity and into situations of the kind of complexity and ambiguity that we have to deal with now.”
Source: The Self Under Siege: Philosophy In The Twentieth Century
“However, I must admit that keeping myself to myself has not always been comforting. At times, I seemed to suffer spells of depression and loneliness, longing to become healthy again; of going out and facing a world of injustices, of misery, of widespread indifference.”
Source: Strangers In Another Country
“That which besets me is indifference. I can't be bothered about people. Or rather, won't. For I avoid, carefully, all occasions for being bothered... Indifference is a form of sloth, and sloth in its turn is one of the symptoms of loveless-ness. One isn't lazy about what one loves. The problem is: how to love?”
Source: Eyeless In Gaza
“It's so diffuse
being alive. Suddenly one is aware
that nobody really gives a damn.”
“It’s a strange feeling when you realise that you have become a passive bystander, watching the quirks of your own fate with an icy indifference.”
Source: Half A Shadow
“Sometimes people wear indifference because it's easier than facing the truth.”
Source: Until I Knew Myself
“Deep in infatuation
I saw all things rosy
Oh the thrill, the excitement,
the new-found energy,
and the bounce in my steps
How so easy to make myself believe
That I was in love! True love!
From where came this jealousy?
This anger? This bitterness?
My loved one is hurting me
I told myself repeatedly.
Days passed. My negativity grew
They need to pay for toying with me
I swore
Prayers for justice
Curses to make them realise what they lost
I saw all things black
Found solace in quotes about Karma...
From where came this calm?
This blissful indifference?
I don't know. I don't care.
All I want to say is: thank you, Time.”
“Faced with delicate issue, consider kindness and deference. It's neither familiarity, indifference nor ire, but a perceived warmth to another soul”
“This is the world in which everyone is sensitised to risk but indifferent to fate.”
“If you are not interested in your own country’s problems, than what difference remains between you and a cow eating grass in a quiet corner unaware of anything around itself!”
“Being indifferent is an effective weapon against bossing.”
“It's a dangerous game Cherrycoke's playing here. Often he thinks the sheer volume of information pouring in through his fingers will saturate, burn him out...she seems determined to overwhelm him with her history and its pain, and the edge of it, always fresh from the stone, cutting at his hopes, at all their hopes. He does respect her: he knows that very little of this is female theatricals, really. She has turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there. And so each time has taken a little more of the Zero into herself. It comes down to courage, at worst an amount of self-deluding that's vanishingly small: he has to admire it, even if he can't accept her glassy wastes, her appeals to a day not of wrath but of final indifference...”
Source: Gravity’s Rainbow
“Immune to the blandishments of religions, countries, families, and whatever else that—with a smattering of emotive images and strains of maudlin music—can move the average citizen to tears or violence, the pessimist is invisible in both history books and the media. Without belief in gods or ghosts, unmotivated by a comprehensive delusion, he could never plant a bomb, plan a revolution, or shed blood for a cause. Pessimists are indeed lackadaisical as partisans in the human drama.”
Source: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
“Every war, every plague is God’s judgment. But every man who rises up to stop the wars and the plagues is God’s instrument. Human action is God’s will, not blind indifference in the face of suffering.”
“Life is about getting the right proportions of warm concern and cool indifference.”
“لقد كان الإدراك حقاً سبباً من أسباب الشقاء، إلا أننا لا يمكن أن نتخلى عنه ما إن نكبر، لأن اللامبالاة ستورثنا المزيد من الأذى، أدركتُ حينئذ أنه ما أن نكبر لا يعود في إمكاننا أن نتخلى عن الإدراك ولن نرغب في ذلك أصلاً، لأنه إذا ما حدث ذلك سنوسم بالجنون.”
Source: صراع الأقنعة
“After all, what Buddhism offers as a solution is universalised indifference - a learning of how to withdraw from too much empathy. This is why Buddhism can so easily turn into the very opposite of universal compassion: the advocacy of a ruthless military attitude, which is what the fate of Zen Buddhism aptly demonstrates.”