Callousness Quotes

The assurance that we have no means of answering [final] questions is no valid excuse for callousness towards them. The more deeply should we feel, down to the roots of our being, their pressure and their sting. Whose hunger has ever been [sated] with the knowledge that he could not eat? (José Ortega y Gasset)
The Dutch at close proximity looked much like Americans, apart from their peculiar uniforms, and so it was their uniforms I fired at, half convinced that I was killing, not human beings, but enemy costumes, which had borne their contents here from a distant land; and if some living man suffered for his enslavement to the uniform, or was penetrated by the bullets aimed at it-well, that was unavoidable, and the fault couldn't be placed at my feet. The private charade was not equivalent to Courage, but it enabled a Callousness that served a similar purpose. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival. View quote
Adrienne Rich
Death and it's associates, after the initial shock produce callousness. View quote
R. K. Narayan
Callousness and insolence bring to bare unanimous social condemnation, while the simple efforts of politeness are admired; even in those who are otherwise despised. View quote
Bryant H. McGill
If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end! View quote
H. P. Lovecraft
War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder. View quote
Alexander Berkman
The end result of experiencing terror and injury is not an increase in compassion, but a tendency toward callousness. View quote
Joseph Heller
The commercial prostitution of love is the last outcome of our whole social system, and its most clear condemnation. It flaunts in our streets, it hides itself in the garment of respectability under the name of matrimony, it eats in actual physical disease and death right through our midst; it is fed by the oppression and the ignorance of women, by their poverty and denied means of livelihood, and by the hypocritical Puritanism which forbids them by millions not only to gratify but even to speak of their natural desires; and it is encouraged by the callousness of an age which has accustomed men to buy and sell for money every most precious thing - even the life-long labor of their brothers, therefore why not also the very bodies of their sisters? View quote
Edward Carpenter
Behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair. View quote
John Bowlby
They [women] cannot march as far or as fast as men, or endure the front-line ordeal as well, or drive a bayonet into an enemy with the same force, or tackle bare-handed an opponent far more muscular and brutal than they are. Some may be trained to shoot well, but whether they will do so in action with male callousness (and eagerness) is doubtful. Courage doesn't come into it. Women are if anything braver than men, but the notion of a female teenager fighting hand-to-hand with a Panzer Grenadier or a Japanese White Tiger - or a Royal Marine - is ludicrous. (George MacDonald Fraser)
Our oceans have been the victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff-like callousness by the world's fisheries. View quote
Daniel Pauly
We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one's life. View quote
William James
We speak but once. Do not repeat your questions. What is not understood or is unheard is lost to Earth. You may find new ways of understanding and ascent, but by new steps. Therefore be alert. Tiredness is not dangerous. But levity and callousness are banes to mankind. Like a householder in constant action, be not afraid of a few drops of labor's perspiration. Even a misguided action is better than passivity. Attain the port. For each one is a ship provided. View quote
Helena Roerich
Keen sensibility is doubtless a virtue of high order, when it does not interfere with steadiness of hand or coolness of nerve; but for the practitioner in his working-day world, a callousness which thinks only of the good to be effected, and goes ahead regardless of smaller considerations, is the preferable quality. View quote
William Osler
The mythology built around the Civil War-that victory by the North eradicated slavery and all of its vestiges throughout our nation-has obscured our discussions of the impact of chattel slavery and made it difficult to have a national dialogue on how to fully account for its place in American history and public policy. While it is nearly impossible to determine how the lives touched by slavery could have flourished in the absence of bondage, we have certain datum that permits us to examine how a subset of Americans – African Americans – have been affected by the callousness of involuntary servitude. We know that in almost every segment of society – education, healthcare, jobs and wealth – the inequities that persist in America are more acutely and disproportionately felt in Black America. View quote
Sheila Jackson Lee
There is a certain callousness in families like mine. They put up strong barriers so as not to see the misery in the world outside and I rebelled against it. View quote
Baba Amte
Want of love is a degree of callousness; for love is the perfection of consciousness. View quote
Rabindranath Tagore