matter of indifference

Surveying the blighted world around us, however, it seems to me there are worse places to take refuge in than a time when, as Roth put it in “The Radetzky March,” “it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died.”

“Indifferent! Oh! no—I never conceived you could become indifferent. Letters are no matter of indifference; they are generally a very positive curse.”

It simply cannot be that what the appeals court decides on due process at Guantanamo is a matter of indifference to the department.

The supposed egalitarianism of our society, she writes, “does not arise from sincerity. It is based on the pretense that we must speak to each other as if social standings were a matter of indifference.”

But Wu says that now, the danger that we face is produced by the endless proliferation of speech, which acts as a kind of censor—not in the heavy-handed way of government forces, but because it reduces everything to a matter of indifference and sameness.