Quotes About Dignity

In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity.

Human rights rest on human dignity. The dignity of man is an ideal worth fighting for and worth dying for.

It's really not hard to keep your dignity and sign to a major label... Most people don't have any dignity in the first place.

To stand by yourself -- that was also part of dignity. That way, a person could get through a public flaying with dignity. Galileo. Luther. Even somebody who admitted his guilt and resisted the temptation to deny it. Something politicians couldn't do. Honesty, the courage for honesty. With others and yourself.

One should not be assigned one's identity in society by the job slot one happens to fill. If we truly believe in the dignity of labor, any task can be performed with equal pride because none can demean the basic dignity of a human being.

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.

By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world, whither we understand it as created or uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind.

Without God man has no reference point to define himself. 20th century philosophy manifests the chaos of man seeking to understand himself as a creature with dignity while having no reference point for that dignity.

My dear friends, God’s creation is one and it is good. The concerns for nonviolence, sustainable development, justice and peace, and care for our environment are of vital importance for humanity. They cannot, however, be understood apart from a profound reflection on the innate dignity of every human life from conception to natural death: a dignity conferred by God himself and thus inviolable.

All that passes is raised to the dignity of expression; all that happens is raised to the dignity of meaning. Everything is either symbol or parable.

If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science.

I never defended myself. Not once. I never said, "Excuse me? What gives you the right to insult and demean me?" I let them steal my dignity.

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.

Women's rights in essence is really a movement for freedom, a movement for equality, for the dignity of all women, for those who work outside the home and those who dedicate themselves with more altruism than any profession I know to being wives and mothers, cooks and chauffeurs, and child psychologists and loving human beings.

When we, hijras, started our activism, we had to tell people, "We exist, we are humans. Please give us nothing but our basic dignity." The biggest misery in the world, I believe, is the feeling of being unloved, and that this community faces a lot. You're not even considered to be human. You're considered transparent. We were ignored until we started organizing, when HIV first became a factor. Even in the HIV world, people could not believe that hijras have sex. And then also we were put in the category of men having sex with men, the gay community.

The ministers of Christ should possess refinement. All uncouth manners, attitudes and gestures should be discarded, and they should encourage in themselves humble dignity of bearing.

Meditation is the art of awareness. And once you are aware, out of your awareness your actions will arise - not out of conscience. Conscience is cultivated by others, by the vested interests, by the establishment. Consciousness is yours. It is individual, it is not collective. Conscience is part of the mob psychology. Consciousness gives you dignity because it gives you individuality. It gives you rebellion, it makes you capable of saying yes or no of your own accord. There is no foreign agency manipulating you in the name of religion, morality, etcetera.

Everyone in the world worth being nice to. Because God never creates inferior human beings, each person deserves respect and dignity.

The hated system of land tenure, so contributory to general unrest in Asia, has been abolished. Every farmer is now accorded the right and dignity of ownership of the land he long has tilled.

We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.

All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue.

This is his uncle's teaching, this Worcester, Malevolent to you In all aspects, Which makes him prune himself and bristle up The crest of youth against your dignity.

There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life

Not just Christians and Jews, but also Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and the followers of many other religions believe in values like peace, respect, tolerance and dignity. These are values that bring people together and enable us to build responsible and solid communities.

Care for life and physical health, with due regard for the needs of others and the common good, is concomitant with respect for human dignity.

I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it's for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.

For me, my faith informs my life. I try and spend a little time on my knees every day. But it all for me begins with cherishing the dignity, the worth, the value of every human life.

We Woosters freeze like the dickens when we seek sympathy and meet with cold reserve. "Nothing further Jeeves", I said with quiet dignity.

Be mild with the mild, shrewd with the crafty, confiding to the honest, rough to the ruffian, and a thunderbolt to the liar. But in all this, never be unmindful of your own dignity.

Americans are a very backward people, with all the real virtues of a backward people; the patriarchal simplicity and human dignity of a democracy, and a respect for labor uncorrupted by cynicism.

I believe work is good. There is dignity in work. I also believe that a hard-work ethic forges strong leaders.

James Baldwin is one of the greatest, North American writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and a brilliant social critic, he foreshadowed the destructive trends happening now in the whole Western world and beyond, while always maintaining a sense of humanistic hope and dignity. He explored palpable, yet unspoken, intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies and the inevitable, if unnameable, tensions with personal identity, assumptions, uncertainties, yearning, and questing.

The world knows of Rosa Parks because of a single, simple act of dignity and courage that struck a lethal blow to the foundations of legal bigotry.

Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.

Education makes life self-reliant. It inspires man to live with dignity in the society. It is the foremost requisite of a teacher to identify his own virtues. He needs to live supported by his inherent virtues-and must continue to uphold them.

Perhaps those, who, trembling most, maintain a dignity in their fate, are the bravest: resolution on reflection is real courage.

The dignity of the individual demands that he be not reduced to vassalage by the largesse of others.

This is a debate about our understanding of human dignity, what it means to be a member of the human family, even though tiny, powerless and unwanted

Never let anyone make you feel inferior for being who you are. When you live the life you were meant to live, in freedom and dignity

What interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that's been given to them, and find some dignity.

The Dancer believes that his art has something to say which cannot be expressed in words or in any other way than by dancing... there are times when the simple dignity of movement can fulfill the function of a volume of words. There are movements which impinge upon the nerves with a strength that is incomparable, for movement has power to stir the senses and emotions, unique in itself. This is the dancer's justification for being, and his reason for searching further for deeper aspects of his art.

A God who chastises our lack of faith, our vices, the little esteem in which we hold dignity and the civic virtues. We tolerate vice, we make ourselves its accomplices, at times we applaud it, and it is just, very just that we suffer the consequences, that our children suffer them. It is the God of liberty ... who obliges us to love it, by making the yoke heavy for us - a God of mercy, of equity, who while He chastises us betters us and only grants prosperity to him who has merited it through his efforts. The school of suffering tempers, the arena of combat strengthens the soul.

Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it.

[The woman] paused and seemed to take a deep breath. 'You see,' she declared. 'I am Tom Mallow's aunt.' Catherine's first instinct was to burst out laughing. She wondered why there was something slightly absurd about aunts; perhaps it was because one thought of them as dear, comfortable creatures, somehow lacking in dignity and prestige.

To say that there is a case for heroes is not to say that there is a case for hero worship. The surrender of decision, the unquestioning submission to leadership, the prostration of the average man before the Great Man -- these are the diseases of heroism, and they are fatal to human dignity. History amply shows that it is possible to have heroes without turning them into gods. And history shows, too, that when a society, in flight from hero worship, decides to do without great men at all, it gets into troubles of its own.

nothing is more important than empathy for another human being's suffering. Nothing. Not a career, not wealth, not intelligence, certainly not status. We have to feel for one another if we're going to survive with dignity.