Apathy
Quotes
Organized alphabetically by author.- I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate — it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.
- Leo Buscaglia
- 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.
- Helen Keller
- Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms (1764-99)
- Once you have glimpsed the world as it might be, as it ought to be, as it's going to be (however that vision appears to you), it is impossible to live compliant and complacent anymore in the world as it is.
- Victoria Safford in "The Small Work in the Great Work" in The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear (2004) by Paul Rogat Loeb
- Indifference, if let alone, will produce obduracy; and obduracy, if let alone, will produce torment.
- Henry Melvill, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 344.
- Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
- George Jean Nathan
- There are few signs in a soul's state more alarming than that of religious indifference, that is, the spirit of thinking all religions equally true— the real meaning of which is, that all religions are equally false.
- Frederick William Robertson, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 344.
- The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
- George Bernard Shaw, The Devil's Disciple (1897)
- He who has never hoped can never despair.
- George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1906)
- He who does not punish evil commands it to be done.
- Leonardo da Vinci
- Harold Wilson is going around the country stirring up apathy.
- William Whitelaw
- Apathy is the glove in which evil slips its hand.
- "Prof. McDoogle" in National Lampoon's Van Wilder
Anonymous
- The opposite of love is not hate, it is apathy. Apathy is when you would do nothing for someone. Love is when you would do anything.
- What's the difference between ignorance and apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
- Variant: Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
- Apathy can only be spread by those who do not bother to do anything about it.