"And if you cannot remain indifferent, you must resolve to throw your weight into that balance in which the fate and condition of man is weighed"
About this Quote
The specific intent is recruitment. Not to a party platform, exactly, but to a posture of participation that feels urgent and physical. "Throw your weight" is blunt, almost bodily language, rejecting the genteel idea that politics is merely opinion. For a 19th-century nationalist leader fighting the Habsburg Empire, this isn’t abstraction; it’s a call to citizens and sympathetic outsiders to convert sympathy into risk, time, and consequence.
The subtext is a rebuke to spectatorship: the comfortable onlooker who "cannot remain indifferent" (because events are too unjust, too close, too human) yet wants to stop at sentiment. Kossuth offers only two stable identities: the indifferent, or the committed. Anything in between is self-deception.
That binary has the rhetorical snap of revolutionary speech. It compresses complexity into a moral decision point, the kind that turns political struggle into personal character. In Kossuth’s world, history isn’t written by inevitability; it’s written by whoever shows up heavy enough to tip the scale.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Kossuth, Lajos. (2026, January 16). And if you cannot remain indifferent, you must resolve to throw your weight into that balance in which the fate and condition of man is weighed. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/and-if-you-cannot-remain-indifferent-you-must-96631/
Chicago Style
Kossuth, Lajos. "And if you cannot remain indifferent, you must resolve to throw your weight into that balance in which the fate and condition of man is weighed." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/and-if-you-cannot-remain-indifferent-you-must-96631/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"And if you cannot remain indifferent, you must resolve to throw your weight into that balance in which the fate and condition of man is weighed." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/and-if-you-cannot-remain-indifferent-you-must-96631/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.







