26 Apathy Quotes

I'm not yet desperate enough to do anything about the conditions that are making me desperate.

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.

I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate - it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.

Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.

The 'democracy gap' in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote, or listlessly vote for the 'least worst' every four years and then wonder why after every cycle the 'least worst' gets worse.

When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible.

Now there's this about cynicism. It's the universe's most supine moral position. Real comfortable. If nothing can be done, then you're not some kind of shit for not doing it, and you can lie there and stink to yourself in perfect peace.

Half the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for President - the same half?

Apathy: 'We are all struggling, whether we know it at times or not. Even in our moments of individual bliss, an incubus of ignorance, fear and hunger still haunts large regions of the world. I am recalcitrant to the ever pervasive ethos of apathy that haunts my part of the world, but not nearly enough.'

Anxiety occurs because of a threat to the values a person identifies with his existence as a self...most anxiety comes from a threat to social, emotional and moral values the person identifies with himself. And here we find that a main source of anxiety, particularly in the younger generation, is that they do not have viable values available in the culture on the basis of which they can relate to their world. The anxiety which is inescapable in an age in which values are so radically in transition is a central cause of apathy..., such prolonged anxiety tends to develop into lack of feeling and the experience of depersonalization.

Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be the moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx--my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me--we're sinning! We're succeeding! We're human after all!) [citation needed]

I remember doing nothing on the night Sinatra died And the night Jeff Buckley died And the night Kurt Cobain died And the night John Lennon died.

Somebody said...We got to find the words Got to, got to be an answer there Somebody said that...You never get heard 'Cause nobody really cares

The kids are turned off from politics, they say. Most of 'em don't even want to hear about it. All they want to do these days is lie around on waterbeds and smoke that goddamn marrywanna... yeah, and just between you and me Fred thats probably all for the best

Multiple gunshots fill the block the fun stops niggas calling cops, people shot nobody stop , I wonder when the world stop caring last night, two kids shot while the whole block staring

It's just another murder, nobody mourns no more/My tear drops gettin bigger but can't figure what I'm cryin for

I've always been so apathetic. I figured okay, maybe the world is going to fall down around me. Now I feel: maybe that's motherhood, too. I want to make a better world, I want to make sure she has some place to walk around.

I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.

The people are asleep; they remain indifferent. They forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters to crucify their Christs. (p. 304)

The people can have anything they want. The trouble is, they do not want anything. At least they vote that way on election day.

The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.

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.