I often feel that worse than the most fiendish Nazis were those Germans who went along with the persecution of the Jews not because they really disliked them but because it was the thing.
It's fashionable to be indifferent to other people's suffering
The great enemy of morality is indifference.
Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and a sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.
Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols -- it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.
I was very apprehensive, mostly because I didn’t want to get caught. By now, I had begun to feel removed from the everyday world of morality. Guilt had become more a fear of getting caught than any sense of right or wrong.
The conscience of America seems to be paralyzed... We seem to be insensible to the things that are now taking place on motion picture screens and on the news stands that are constantly stimulating our young people.
I can learn to live with guilt. I don't care about being good.
[Some men are shortsighted, so] going to prison or going to hell just doesn't matter to these men.
When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence.
It is the generation of the unemphatic. Steal, kill, lie, fornicate, but beware of indulging with conviction.
Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action; it inspires no enthusiasm; it has no missionaries, no crusades, no martyrs.
If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.
