Quotes About Dignity

MLK, Jr. taught me how to say no to segregation, and I can hear him saying now... when you straighten up your back, no man can ride you. He said stand up straight and say no to racial discrimination.

I will not remain silent, resigned to watch as my fellow prisoners collapse under the strain of slavery-like conditions.

It is a strange enterprise to make respectable people laugh.

meaning is one of our greatest needs, and when it's fulfilled, we can endure any type of suffering with dignity.

When I honor, I don't keep track of it. I don't save it for later as a leverage point to get the other person to honor me. I do it because the behavior is consistent with the person I want to be.

The old man's histrionics confirmed Tannhauser in his view that when misfortune befell the privileged they bore it with far less dignity, and a great deal more self pity, than did the rest of the human race.

As to Baker, that name should be forgotten," Winthrop wrote in The Canoe and the Saddle. "Mountains should not be insulted by being named after undistinguished bipeds.…

To look at the face [of Princess Angeline] and not see humanity is to lack humanity.

you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights. —BISHOP DESMOND TUTU, South African cleric and activist

If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it. Professions

If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.

Jewish resistance in Warsaw was not only about the dignity of the Jews but about the dignity of humanity as such, including those of the Poles, the British, the Americans, the Soviets: of everyone who could have done more, and instead did less.30

a man can be human only under human conditions." The purpose of the state is to preserve these conditions, so that its citizens need not see personal survival as their only goal.

lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.

there is nothing, in fact, which man cannot be forced to do by hunger and pain." Herling became convinced "that a man can only be human under human conditions." From

Reputation. It cost something, but it was worth something too.

False shame only is harmful

The worst kind of shame is being ashamed of frugality or poverty.

You come to a wedding, you should dress with the dignity of a funeral, because who the fuck knows when you'll ever see the couple again, and who the fuck knows when they'll see you again. So you get your look right, you don't glam it up, you don't whore it up, even though it's Las Vegas. No one ever got kicked out of a place in Las Vegas for dressing elegantly.

I felt how much better and more dignified it was for me to show off the finer side of my soul than of my body.

Better to lose your husband than waste your life

What psychology failed to appreciate, Frankl believed, is the multidimensional nature of human beings. He did not deny that biology or conditioning shapes us, but he also insisted that there is room for free will—to choose to develop certain values or a particular course in life, or to retain our dignity in difficult situations.

As life often seems to boil down to the outcome of such interactions, it is worth understanding what is happening below the surface of what is actually said, and how to manage an encounter while keeping everyone's dignity intact.