Quotes About Indifference

These are our realities, and, like our ancestors of fifty thousand years ago, if we--as a species rather than as an individual--are uninformed or careless, or indifferent to the Facts (emphasis mine), then survival as a species is in serious doubt. ~~John D. MacDonald, Reading for Survival. c. 1987

There are lives to be lived if only you didn't care. Care for what, for what; the opinion of mankind, money, success, hotel lobbies, health, umbrellas, Uneeda biscuits . . .?

A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

The spirit of our day is a soft acceptance of everything—except deep conviction in anything.

Man is an everlack, an infinite withoutness, afloat on an apparently endless ocean of apparently endless indifference to individual things. Obscurely he sees catastrophes happening to other rafts, rafts that are too distant for him to determine whether they have other humans aboard, but too numerous and too identical for him to presume that they have not.

We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability - however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.

Era inútil. Ella había matado todo romance entre los dos, y se había convertido en una mujer cualquiera para mi. Como las demás. Ya había dejado de respetarla; ya nada quedaba de respetar en ella.

No le importa lo que yo digo y lo que siento. Mis sentimientos no significan nada para él. El hecho que le importa es que me tiene en su poder.

FALDER is sitting exactly opposite to the JUDGE, who, raised above the clamour of the court, also seems unconscious of and indifferent to everything.

He was neutral on prayer, skeptical of free speech, sympathetic to tax protestors, indifferent to Indians, afraid of blacks, tough on pornographers, soft on criminals, and fairly consistent in his protection of the environment

Mr. Dean, I will not hear you. You have nothing to do with me, nor I with you.

Though not all, by any means, were so open about their purposes, all of them showed us how they felt about the Negro, the idea that we were people of such morality that nothing could offend us. These men, young and old, however, were less offensive than the ones who treated us like machines, as though we had no human existence whatsoever. When they paid me, they looked as though I were a stone or a post. They looked and saw nothing.

He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.

People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.

THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN GET AMERICANS TO NOTICE ANYTHING IS TO TAX THEM OR DRAFT THEM OR KILL THEM," Owen said. He said that once—when Hester proposed abolishing the draft. "IF YOU ABOLISH THE DRAFT," said Owen Meany, "MOST AMERICANS WILL SIMPLY STOP CARING ABOUT WHAT WE'RE DOING IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD." I

Is it ignorance or apathy, I forget the lessons taught to me.

I couldn't give a rat's tutu about your emotional distress

We cannot have islands of excellence in a sea of slovenly indifference to standards.

If I didn't care for fun and such, I'd probably amount to much. But I shall stay the way I am, Because I do not give a damn.

No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.

I have my work and my faith... If that's boring to some people, I can't tell you how much I don't care.

Indifference to one's own faith is no proof of tolerance. Loyalty to one's own is part of a larger loyalty to faith generally.

That's the hardest thing of all--never to become cynical, never to lose faith, never to become indifferent.

I'm done with the tears. I'm wiping my eyes. If he doesn't care, why should I?