Moral Apathy Quotes

The opposite of good is not evil, the opposite of good is indifference.

Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society.

Those who don't fight evil hate those who do; and those who don't fight real evils make up little evils

There are certain seasons in the course of human affairs, when Genius, Virtue, and Patriotism, seems to nod over the vices of the times.

The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

We all dread a bodily paralysis, and would make use of every contrivance to avoid it; but none of us is troubled about a paralysis of the soul.

My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.

His calls for justice were lost at the mercy of the wind and human indifference.

It's indifference and ignorance that stops people from doing the right thing.

Our princes take the Word of God no more seriously than a cow does the game of chess.

… utterly destitute of moral sensibility

With intellectuals, moral thought is often less a tonic that quickens ethical action than a narcotic that deadens it.

Oh, I steal things all the time. It's just something I do. I stopped caring a long time ago.

Indifference is the sign of sickness, a sickness of the soul more contagious than any other.

Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

The heart of the matter is that some people like to cause injury or death to living things. And many of those who do not are indifferent to those who do.

Surrounded as we are by the wants and woes of our fellow-men, and yet given to follow our own pleasures, regardless of their pains, are we not like people sitting up with a corpse, and making merry in the house of the dead?

Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.

When people start talking of man's inhumanity to man it means they haven't actually walked far enough.

Disregard for the consequences and for right and wrong nowadays passes as energy.

The propensity to avoid moral considerations was producing not simply a politically illiterate and authoritarian society, but one that was increasingly saturated in violence and a culture of cruelty. Needless to say, all of these forces intensified the increasing militarization and corporatization of higher education, along with the privatizing of everyday life.

If you ever get to the place where injustice doesn't bother you, you're dead.

In our time, there are still many, like those in the Good Samaritan story, who being of the religious classes in that time, purposely crossed to the other side of the road, and passed by the injured and bleeding.

...in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.