We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.

- Cynthia Ozick

I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

- Susan Sontag

I always believe that ultimately, if people are paying attention, then we get good government and good leadership. And when we get lazy, as a democracy and civically start taking shortcuts, then it results in bad government and politics.

- Barack Obama

All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.

- Albert Camus

It may well be that our means are fairly limited and our possibilities restricted when it comes to applying pressure on our government. But is this a reason to do nothing? Despair is nor an answer. Neither is resignation. Resignation only leads to indifference, which is not merely a sin but a punishment

- Elie Wiesel

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.

- George Bernard Shaw

The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.

- Louis D. Brandeis

The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.

- Henri-Frederic Amiel

Is it ignorance or apathy? Hey, I don't know and I don't care.

- Jimmy Buffett

The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead.

- William Lloyd Garrison

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

- Robert M. Hutchins

That only a few, under any circumstances, protest against the injustice of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real only proves their apathy and deeper degradation.

- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

- Plato

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.

- Thomas Carlyle

In lazy Apathy let Stoics boast,
Their Virtue fix'd, 'tis fixed as in a frost.

- Alexander Pope

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -- the apathy of human beings.

- Helen Keller

[I]n such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.

- Albert Camus

What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority.

- Molly Ivins