Quotes About Dignity

If you don't respect me you're not gonna get that respect back.

I have known Mr. Kumar Mangalam Birla for a long time. He is a good man. He is a decent man.

This is no occupation for an adult who can look other adults in the eye, carry his own weight, and count himself one of them.

Brutal worlds where females are secondary to the action, mere chattels or bargaining counters, may be realistic, but they're not for me. I aim to write women who are genuine.

a woman should have every honorable motive to exertion which is enjoyed by man, to the full extent of her capacities and endowments. The case is too plain for argument. Nature has given woman the same powers, and subjected her to the same earth, breathes the same air, subsists on the same food, physical, moral, mental and spiritual. She has, therefore, an equal right with man, in all efforts to obtain and maintain a perfect existence.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

The soul that is within me no man can degrade.

It was necessary to keep our religious masters at St. Michael's unacquainted with the fact, that, instead of spending the Sabbath in wrestling, boxing, and drinking whisky, we were trying to learn how to read the will of God; for they had much rather see us engaged in those degrading sports, than to see us behaving like intellectual, moral, and accountable beings.

Right is of no sex, Truth is of no color, God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren

There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.

How do you feel, said a friend to me, when you are hooted and jeered on the street on account of your color? I feel as if an ass had kicked, but had hit nobody, was my answer.

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace.

The better you treat a slave, the more you destroy his value as a slave, and enhance the probability of his eluding the grasp of the slaveholder; the more kindly you treat him, the more wretched you make him, while you keep him in the condition of a slave.

Men who live by robbing their fellow men of their labor and liberty have forfeited their right to know anything of the thoughts, feelings, or purposes of those whom they rob and plunder. They have by the single act of slaveholding voluntarily placed themselves beyond the laws of justice and honor, and have become only fitted for companionship with thieves and pirates - the common enemies of God and of all mankind.

A man without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him.

and stature commanding and exact—in intellect richly endowed—in natural eloquence a prodigy—in soul manifestly created but a little lower than the angels—yet a slave, ay, a fugitive slave,—trembling for his safety, hardly daring to believe

none to molest them or make them afraid.

And the only explanation I can now think of does not entirely satisfy me; but such as it is, I will give it. Mr. Covey enjoyed the most unbounded reputation for being a first-rate overseer and negro-breaker. It was of considerable importance to him. That reputation was at stake; and had he sent me—a boy about sixteen years old—to the public whipping-post, his reputation would have been lost; so, to save his reputation, he suffered me to go unpunished.

All of this added weight to his reputation as a "nigger-breaker.

A man, without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even this it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise.

Frederick Douglass

You shall only have foes to be hated; but not foes to be despised: you must be proud of your foes. Thus have I already taught.

One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.