Quotes About Dignity

Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.

Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw on. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come--and escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.

AT THE CENTER of Wilson's work was an attempt to solve a deceptively simple puzzle: what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves?

The professionals and institutions we turn to should...not confine people's choices, in the name of safety, but to expand them, in the name of living a worthwhile life.

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life—to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be. Sickness

what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves?

This simple but profound service—to grasp a fading man's need for everyday comforts, for companionship, for help achieving his modest aims—is the thing that is still so devastatingly lacking more than a century later.

Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once.

Whereas today people often understate their age to census takers, studies of past censuses have revealed that they used to overstate it. The dignity of old age was something to which everyone aspired.

Dressing somebody is easier than letting them dress themselves. It takes less time. It's less aggravation. So unless supporting people's capabilities is made a priority, the staff ends up dressing people like they're rag dolls. Gradually, that's how everything begins to go. The tasks come to matter more than the people.

Our most cruel failure is in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognise that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life.

It seems we've succumbed to a belief that, once you lose your physical independence, a life of worth and freedom is simply not possible. Nursing home staff like, and approve of, residents who are "fighters" and show "dignity and self-esteem"—until these traits interfere with the staff's priorities for them. Then they are "feisty.

The cockroach who is dying and the woman who is blind agree not to notice each other's shame.

Don't try and go through life worrying about if somebody like you or not. You best be making sure they doing right by you

Don't you go through life worrying about whether somebody like you or not, you best be making sure that they do right by you.

HEDLEY: He would not call me King. He laughed to think a black man could be King. I did not want to lose my name, so I told him to call me the name my father gave me, and he laugh. He would not call me King, and I beat him hard with a stick.

In societies where men are truly confident of their own worth, women are not merely tolerated but valued. (From a speech read on video on August 31, 1995 before the NGO Forum on Women, Beijing, China)

Self respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it.

If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others.

A quest for self-respect is proof of its lack

Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man's independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.

It's so graceless, being a martyr. It's honoring your adversaries too much.

I am not the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds, I am not a sacrifice on their altars.

It's said that the worst thing one can do to a man is to kill his self-respect. But that's not true. Self-respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it.