Indignation

Indignation is anger, disgust, contempt or resentment caused by injustice.

Quotes

• When I remember a few lines of poetry, when I recall some sublime painting, my spirit is roused to indignation and spurns the vain sustenance of the common herd.
  • Eugène Delacroix, letter to J. B. Pierret, September 18, 1818

• So long as my voice can be heard on this or the other side of the Atlantic, I will hold up America to the lightning scorn of moral indignation. In doing this, I shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot; for he is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins. It is righteousness that exalteth a nation while sin is a reproach to any people.
  • Frederick Douglass, "Love of God, Love of Man, Love of Country" (24 September 1847)

• If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.
  • Che Guevara, as quoted in The Quotable Rebel : Political Quotations for Dangerous Times (2005) by Teishan Latner, p. 112

• Facit indignatio versum.
  • Indignation leads to the making of poetry.
    • Juvenal, Satires (early 2nd century), I. 79

• One cannot suppress a certain indignation when one sees men’s actions on the great world-stage and finds, beside the wisdom that appears here and there among individuals, everything in the large woven together from folly, childish vanity, even from childish malice and destructiveness.
  • Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

• True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just."
  • Martin Luther King, Jr. Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (1967)

• Atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.
  • C. Wright Mills, Letters & Autobiographical Writings (1954), p. 184

• The Greeks have a word for indignation at another’s unhappiness: this affect was inadmissible among Christian peoples and failed to develop, so they also lack a name for this more manly brother of pity.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, § 78

• The stupidity of moral indignation, which is the unfailing sign in a philosopher that his philosophical sense of humor has left him.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, § 25

• He that is angry without cause, shall be in danger; but he that is angry with cause, shall not be in danger: for without anger, teaching will be useless, judgments unstable, crimes unchecked. ... To be angry is therefore not always an evil.
  • Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum in Summa Theologica, 2.2.158

• Many of the noisiest are more interested in their indignation than in the injustice.
  • James Richardson, Interglacial (2004), Aphorism #22

• If, in proportion as our minds are enlarged, our hearts purified, and our consciences cultivated, our abhorrence of wrong and aversion to it increases, what must be the moral indignation of the infinite and holy God against wrong-doers?
  • Edward Thompson, in Life of Edward Thomson, p. 195

See also

• Anger
• Injustice

External links

Emotions
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