Apathy Quotes

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

principles

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Following his dear friend and comrade Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, King believed that indifference to evil is more evil than evil itself.

evil Martin Luther King

Indifference is dangerous, whether innocent or not.

Those of us who do nothing... are complicit in exploitation, slavery [and other social ills.] We are complicit through our silence, through our inaction, through our apathy.

We do not have the right to be indifferent or to look the other way.

When the news only makes us exclaim, "What an atrocity!" and immediately turn the page or change the channel, then we have destroyed [the sense of] proximity [to suffering], [and] we have widened even more the space that separates us.

We must stop hiding the pain of our losses and take responsibility for our crimes, our apathy, and our lies, because it is only through reparative reconciliation that we will be resuscitated, and, in the process, that we will lose fear of our own selves.

helping others

More good things in life are lost by indifference than ever were lost by active hostility.

action morals

Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand.

morals action

Love me or hate me, but spare me your indifference.

morals action

I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate—it's apathy.

morals action

It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men have something worth fighting for, they do not feel like fighting.

action morals

There is nothing harder than the softness of indifference.

morals action

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life but that it bothers him less and less.

morals

Crime expands according to our willingness to put up with it.

morals

Anger is not only inevitable, it is necessary. Its absence means indifference, the most disastrous of all human failings.

anger

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

equality civil rights injustice America

If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.

moderation

Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

inaction

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

democracy

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings.

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all—the apathy of human beings.

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambsh. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation.  Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time."

repentance action

We as often repent the good we have done as the ill.

repentance helping others

Indifference is the invincible giant of the world.

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.

The opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.