01175 – Indifference: Worse than Despair
Wiesel, Elie

Why are people indifferent? Don’t people understand that indifference is probably the worst plague that exists in life? It is worse than despair.

Despair is a beginning. Despair can inspire you to create great works of art, music, literature, philosophy, theology. Despair evokes compassion, but indifference is the end. There is nothing beyond…

What is education, what is life, what is friendship, what is love, what is beauty, what is joy if not our own impulse…our own protest against an indifferent society, against an indifferent world that you now are called upon to conquer, not with violence, but with words; not with cruelty, but with compassion; and surely not with hatred, but with a sense of exultation.

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