261 Dignity Quotes

I see God in every human being. When I wash the leper's wounds, I feel I am nursing the Lord himself. Is it not a beautiful experience?

The travesty of slavery wasn't physical abuse. It was the moral abuse of looking at a human being as if they are an animal.

The question isn't whether you have a good master or a bad master. It's to be your own master. That is the dignity of humanity.

A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.

I would recommend all men in choosing a profession to avoid any that may require an apology at every turn; either an apology or else a somewhat violent assertion of right.

It is as great a spite to be praised in the wrong place, and by a wrong person, as can be done to a noble nature.

I would say that the surest measure of a man's or a woman's maturity is the harmony, style, joy, and dignity he creates in his marriage, and the pleasure and inspiration he provides for his spouse.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.

Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.

Though the Negroes are fed, clothed, and housed, and though the Irish peasant is starved, naked, and roofless, the bare name of freemen-the lordship over his own person, the power to choose and will-are blessings beyond food, raiment, or shelter; possessing which, the want of every comfort of life is yet more tolerable than their fullest enjoyment without them.

This country is heaven, in the spiritual sense of the word. And I say, we prefer to die in heaven than survive in hell.

We must at last put a stop to having people move into their quarters like chickens and rabbits into their coops.

All dignified people in the world, whether Arabs or Muslims or others with dignity, are very proud of the speech made by president Bashar al-Assad a few days ago here in Damascus. For me he is the last Arab ruler, and Syria is the last Arab country. It is the fortress of the remaining dignity of the Arabs, and that's why I'm proud to be here.

I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.

Freedom is the open window through which pours the sunlight of the human spirit and human dignity.

Without liberty I have nothing left to use except my body.

Listen, when you take my liberty away, you've taken away more-something more precious than life. I mean, what good is a life without liberty? Huh? None.

The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.

I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.

I may sink, but I'll be damned if I strike!

Oppression is more easily endured than insult.

As you can see, I'm in good health. I have no message; just tell them, please, that I went to my death quietly and in good health.

The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.

You can't imagine the joy I feel when I hear that something I've said or done or written has helped others to regain their sense of dignity, to motivate them to develop their unique potential, to encourage them to reach out to others in love.

Ours is one continued struggle against degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the European, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.

God wants man to fulfill his commands as a human being and with the quality peculiar to human beings.

To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.

A slave's soul has no worth, my brothers; it lacks strength to tread on this great earth with gallantry and freedom. I pity the poor slaves, they're nought but airy mist, a light breeze scatters them, a fragrance knocks them down; it's only just they crawl on the earth on hands and knees. Today I'll write a hymn to God and pray for this great grace.

The high-spirited man may indeed die, but he will not stoop to meanness. Fire, though it may be quenched, will not become cool.

Stand us against a wall and shoot us, well and good, you are victors. But why should I be brought before a Tribunal like a c-c-c-... I can't even get the word [criminal] out!

'You have babies at home. And you have a life. And if you don't, you have to realize that we're people and that we just need privacy and we need our respect. And those are things that you have to have as a human being.'

But he lay like a warrior taking his rest, With his martial cloak around him.

Do you think I am an automaton? - a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you - and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal - as we are!

A society that does not recognise that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom.

The dignity of mankind is in your hands; protect it! It sinks with you! With you it will ascend.

The hat is the pride of man; for he who cannot keep his hat on before kings and emperors is no free man.

You saw his weakness, and he will never forgive you.

The one thing I do not want to be called is First Lady. It sounds like a saddle horse.

If a man happens to find himself, he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.

We are the raison d'etre of the entire system. We are also the employers of those in public office and in the public service. Why should we accept from them a discourse which suggests contempt for us and for the democratic system?

'[The career a young man should choose should be] one that is most consonant with our dignity, one that is based on ideas of whose truth we are wholly convinced, one that offers us largest scope in working for humanity and approaching that general goal towards which each profession offers only one of the means: the goal of perfection [...] If he works only for himself he can become a famous scholar, a great sage, an excellent imaginative writer [Dichter], but never a perfected, a truly great man.'

All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and allowed to live only so far as the interest to the ruling class requires it.

In the code of the Satyagrahi, there is no such thing as surrender to brute force.

'What's the use of dying in a ward surrounded by a lot of groaning and croaking incurables? Wouldn't it be much better to throw a party with that twenty-seven thousand and take poison and depart for the other world to the sound of violins, surrounded by lovely drunken girls and happy friends?'

I see God in every human being. When I wash the leper's wounds, I feel I am nursing the Lord himself. Is it not a beautiful experience?

The dying, the cripple, the mental, the unwanted, the unloved they are Jesus in disguise.

Dignity and love do not blend well, nor do they continue long together.

Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him.

'A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.'

The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity.

'You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can't care anyway,'

We confide in our strength, without boasting of it; we respect that of others, without fearing it.

Since we cannot hope for order let us withdraw with style from the chaos.

'Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.'

Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the staggering evidence of man's sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile. It calls for a daily effort, self-mastery, a precise estimate of the limits of truth, measure, and strength. It constitutes an ascesis. All that 'for nothing,' in order to repeat and mark time. But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.

The rule of our action, the secret of our resistance can be easily stated: everything that humiliates labor also humiliates the intelligence, and vice versa. And the revolutionary struggle, the centuries-old straining toward liberation can be defined first of all as a double and constant rejection of humiliation.

That girls should not marry for money we are all agreed. A lady who can sell herself for a title or an estate, for an income or a set of family diamonds, treats herself as a farmer teats his sheep and oxen- makes hardly more of herself, of her own inner self, in which are comprised a mind and a soul, than the poor wretch of her own sex who earns her bread in the lowest state of degradation.

I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing - his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his 'rightful' position in his society. Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks t attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.

Danforth: Do you mean to deny this confession when you are free? Proctor: I mean to deny nothing! Danforth: Then explain to me, Mr. Proctor, why you will not let - Proctor: [With the cry of his whole soul] Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!

It is not in space that I must seek my human dignity, but in the ordering of my thought. It will do me no good to own land. Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it. (348)

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.

It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression. St. Vincent De Paul cautioned his disciples to deport themselves so that the poor 'will forgive them the bread you give them.'

Why should you call me to account for eating decently?

You will, by the dignity of your Conduct, afford occasion for Posterity to say, when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to Mankind, had this day been wanting, the World had never seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.

For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen ... than witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe.

Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself. [2]

The truth [is] that there is only one terminal dignity - love. And the story of love is not important - what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.

I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It's a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then.

Now comes the part where I relieve you, the little people, of the burden of your failed and useless lives. But, as my plastic surgeon always said: if you gotta go, go with a smile.

Human work must be done thoroughly and honourably because we are now men; whether we ever expect to be angels, or ever were slugs, being practically no matter.

It is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it. Poland fought for freedom as no other country did. The Czech nation was prepared to fight for its freedom in 1938; it was not lack of courage that sealed its fate. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 - the work of young people with nothing to lose but their chains - triumphed and then ended in failure. ... Democracy and freedom do not guarantee the millennium. No, we do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things - and above all on ourselves.

Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity. (1967)

Style...is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.

I will remember this, when I am defeated. To keep dignity, and give honor where it's due, so that defeat is not a disgrace. And I hope I don't have to do it often.

Though her mien carries much more invitation than command, to behold her is an immediate check to loose behavior; to love her is a liberal education.

From scenes like these, old Scotia's grandeur springs, That makes her loved at home, revered abroad: Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, 'An honest man's the noblest work of God.'

Another great task is to confront the poverty of satisfaction--a lack of purpose and dignity--that afflicts us all. Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. (Univ of Kansas, 3-18-68)

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being. The good is the only source of the sacred. There is nothing sacred except the good and what pertains to it. [p.51]

A modern factory reaches perhaps almost the limit of horror. Everybody in it is constantly harassed and kept on edge by the interference of extraneous wills while the soul is left in cold and desolate misery. What man needs is silence and warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium. Physical labour may be painful, but it is not degrading as such. It is not art; it is not science; it is something else, possessing an exactly equal value with art and science, for it provides an equal opportunity to reach the impersonal stage of attention. [p.59]

Now all the truth is out, Be secret and take defeat From any brazen throat, For how can you compete, Being honour bred, with one Who, were it proved he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbours' eyes? Bred to a harder thing Than Triumph, turn away And like a laughing string Whereon mad fingers play Amid a place of stone, Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.

A moral, sensible, and well-bred man Will not affront me, and no other can.

Don't soil your pretty little shoes The gutter's deep and red Climb up climb up and ride along with me the tumbrel driver said But she never said a word never turned her head Don't soil your pretty little pants I only go one way Climb up climb up and ride along with me There's no gold coach today But she never said a word never turned her head

To impoverish that reality whose inhumanity constitutes man's majesty is tantamount to impoverishing him himself. I understand then why the doctrines that explain everything to me also debilitate me at the same time. They relieve me of the weight of my own life, and yet I must carry it alone.

Making Movies is better than cleaning toilets.

We have this day restored the Sovereign to whom all alone men ought to be obedient. He reigns in Heaven, and with a propitious eye beholds his subjects assuming that freedom of thought, and dignity of self-direction which He bestowed on them. From the rising to the setting sun, may His kingdom come.

Keep a stiff upper chin.

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile, The short and simple annals of the poor.

What's my line? I'm happy cleaning windows Take my time I'll see you when my love grows Baby don't let it slide I'm a working man in my prime Cleaning windows...

He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings - all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end. This he could sense even from the old house they lived in, with its solidly built walls and floors that held together like rock: some man, possibly an angry pessimistic man, had built the house long ago, but the house stood, and his anger and pessimism and irritable labourious sweats were forgotten; the house stood, and other men lived in it and were sheltered well in it.