It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they re...cruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And we may be led, then, upward through more Powerful forms of poetry, past columns... With peeling posters on them, to the country of indifference. Meanwhile if the swell diapasons, blooms Unhappily and too soon, the little people are nonetheless real.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country because such affections come natural...ly to us and are good in themselves, although we may corrupt them. We are commanded to love our neighbor because our "natural" attitude toward the "other" is one of either indifference or hostility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the ...world, no species of composition has been so much decried.... "And what are you reading, Miss--?" "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all..., do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, tech...nological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The freedom of indifference, the indifference of freedom, the will dust in the dust of its object, the act a handful of sand let f...all--these were some of the shapes he had sighted, sunset landfall after many days.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But ice-crunching and loud gum-chewing, together with drumming on tables, and whistling the same tune seventy times in succession,... because they indicate an indifference on the part of the perpetrator to the rest of the world in general, are not only registered on the delicate surfaces of the brain but eat little holes in it until it finally collapses or blows up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We find the most terrible form of atheism, not in the militant and passionate struggle against the idea of God himself, but in the... practical atheism of everyday living, in indifference and torpor. We often encounter these forms of atheism among those who are formally Christians.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, whi...ch looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honour a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »