Quotessence
Home / Topics / Heartlessness Quotes

Heartlessness Quotes

Browse 22 quotes about Heartlessness.

Heartlessness Quotes

“Mr. Roosevelt liked to be liked. He courted and wooed people. He had good taste, an affable disposition, and profound delight in people and human relationships. This was probably the single most revealing of all his characteristics; it was both a strength and a weakness, and is a clue to much. To want to be liked by everybody does not merely mean amiability; it connotes will to power, for the obvious reason that if the process is carried on long enough and enough people like the person, his power eventually becomes infinite and universal. Conversely, any man with great will to power and sense of historical mission, like Roosevelt, not only likes to be liked; he has to be liked, in order to feed his ego. But FDR went beyond this; he wanted to be liked not only by contemporaries on as broad a scale as possible, but by posterity. This, among others, is one reason for his collector's instinct. He collected himself—for history. He wanted to be spoken of well by succeeding generations, which means that he had the typical great man's wish for immortality, and hence—as we shall see in a subsequent chapter—he preserved everything about himself that might be of the slightest interest to historians. His passion for collecting and cataloguing is also a suggestive indication of his optimism. He was quite content to put absolutely everything on the record, without fear of what the world verdict of history would be.”

CharmPopularityChurchillFdrWinston ChurchillRooseveltHeartlessnessWill To Power
Book:Roosevelt In Retrospect: A Profile in History
Create image

“Talkativeness and charm are both, as is well-known, characteristics somewhat feminine; and they often add up to guile. Certainly there was a strong streak of the female in Roosevelt, though this is not to disparage his essential masculinity. Confidence in his own charm led him into occasional perilous adventures—almost as a woman may be persuaded with a long series of glittering successes behind her, to think she is irresistible forever and can win anybody's scalp.”

CharmFdrRooseveltHeartlessness
Book:Roosevelt In Retrospect: A Profile in History
Create image

“Charm has an occasional contrary concomitant, heartlessness. The virtuoso is so pleased by the way he produces his effects that he disregards the audience. Once Dorothy Thompson came in to see FDR after a comparatively long period of having been snubbed by the White House—although she had deserted Wilkie for Roosevelt during the campaign just concluded, and as a result had been fired from The New York Herald Tribune, the best job she ever had. Roosevelt greeted her with the remark, "Dorothy, you lost your job, but I kept mine—ha, ha!”

CharmFdrRooseveltHeartlessness
Book:Roosevelt In Retrospect: A Profile in History
Create image

“Fashionable women regard themselves, and are regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure; and the vacuity of mind, the heartlessness, the frivolity which is the necessary result of this false and debasing estimate of women, can only be fully understood by those who have mingled in the folly and wickedness of fashionable life.”

MenMindHeartPleasureResultsUnderstoodRegardInstrumentsMereFollyToysWickednessFashionableFrivolityVacuityHeartlessness
Author:Sarah Moore Grimke
Create image

“Solomon, who was one of the Deity's favorites, had a copulation cabinet composed of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. To save his life he could not have kept two of these young creatures satisfactorily refreshed, even if he had fifteen experts to help him. Necessarily almost the entire thousand had to go hungry for years and years on a stretch. Conceive of a man hardhearted enough to look daily upon all that suffering and not be moved to mitigate it.”

IfsMenYearsLooksTwoEnoughHelpingYoungSufferingThreeWifeViolenceThousandCreaturesHundredMovedSevenHungerSatisfactionHungryCrueltyExpertsFifteenDeitiesCabinetsViolence Against WomenPolygamyInhumanitySolomonRefreshmentsHaremConcubinesHeartlessness
Book:Letters from the Earth: Easyread Edition
Create image

“How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless." "Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them." "I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.”

WayShouldWellsI CanSeemsTroubleCircumstancesEatingCalmHorribleCalmnessHeartlessMake OutMuffinsCuffsHeartlessness
Book:The Importance of Being Earnest
Create image

“We disliked the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.”

WorldHumansFactsUniverseParentBornHuman BeingsSimpleExistenceDyingIgnoranceBlindLongingInjusticeIndifferenceMidstLabyrinthRigourHeartlessnessSimple Beauty
Author:Ben Okri
Create image