Quotes About Dignity

You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.

She moved in a silent ferocity of dignity which barely escaped being ludicrous.

he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him. This is one of the reasons that he became so holy.

and you could see that Mrs. Hunt had been a very beautiful girl down there in Atlanta, where she comes from. And she still had - has - that look, that don't-you-touch-me look, that women who were beautiful carry with them to the grave.

This is the message that has spread through streets and tenements and prisons, through the narcotics wards, and past the filth and sadism of mental hospitals to a people from whom everything has been taken away, including, most crucially, their sense of their own worth. People cannot live without this sense; they will do anything whatever to regain it. This is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.

It is galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them.

America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things. Every Negro woman knows what her man faces when he goes out to work, and what poison he will probably bring back.

I ain't ashamed of it – I'm ashamed of you – you done made me feel a shame I ain't never felt before. I shamed before my God – to let somebody make me cheap, like you done done.

The train will be the same, the people, struggling for comfort and, even, dignity on the straight-backed, wooden, third-class seats will be the same, and I will be the same.

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.

Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That

is galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them.

It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.

There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet...I'm not going to forget it.

Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That is not a mystical statement but a most realistic one...

who watches German prisoners of war being treated by Americans with more human dignity than he has ever received at their hands.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet

When you consider that presidents and chief-justices and archbishops and kings and statesmen are human beings like you and me and the laundryman, the thought becomes too horrible for humanity to face.

A samurai dies with dignity. For what is life to a samurai? Nothing at all. All life is suffering, neh ?

When a man's pride is injured, death is a small price to repay the insult.

It is bad manners to say that you will piss on anyone. Very bad. It is bad manners and very stupid to say that you will piss on anyone when you are unarmed. It is very bad manners and even more stupid to say that you will piss on anyone when you are unarmed, powerless, and not prepared to allow your friends and family or whomever to perish first.

Money means nothing to a real man.

It's wisest always to be so clad that our friends need not ask us for our names.

Be smart, be strong, be proud, live honorably and with dignity, and just hold on.