Quotes About Dignity

If you make a fool of yourself, you can do it with dignity, without taking your pants down. And if you do take your pants down, you can still do it with dignity.

Dignity is not negotiable. Dignity is the honor of the family.

Somehow I had come to believe that because a person is in need, they are candidates for sympathy, not just charity. It was not that I wanted to buy her groceries, the government was already doing that. I wanted to buy her dignity. And yet, by judging her, I was the one taking her dignity away.

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.

When we deny the poor and the vulnerable their own human dignity and capacity for freedom and choice, it becomes self-denial. It becomes a denial of both our collective and individual dignity, at all levels of society.

The supreme belief of our society is the dignity and freedom of the individual. To the respect of that dignity, to the defense of that freedom, all effort is pledged.

In South America euphemism appears to be the grisly preserve of violent power. 'Liberty' was the name of the biggest prison in Uruguay under the military dictatorship, while in Chile one of the concentration camps was called 'Dignity.' It was the self-styled 'Peace and Justice' paramilitary group in Chiapas [Mexico] that in 1997 shot 45 peasants in the back, nearly all of them women and children, as they prayed in a church. What have the souls of the south done over the past few decades to deserve quite so much liberty and dignity and peace and justice?

It has been difficult for [young people in the U.S.] to connect the dots between rising tuition costs and other assaults on their dignity with the ongoing assault on public life and its myriad democratic institutions. Today's generation faces an enormous battle in turning back the current assaults on the social state, higher education, and the social good.

Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them... A religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

Where there is no work, there is no dignity.

Human dignity ... is derived from a sense of independence.

Love for others and respect for their rights and their human dignity, irrespective of who or what they are, no matter what religion - or none - that they choose to follow, will bring about real change and set in motion proper relationships. With such relationships built on equality and trust, we can work together on so many of the threats to our common humanity.

There is no worse material poverty, I am keen to stress, than the poverty which prevents people from earning their bread and deprives them of the dignity of work.

Bush and his commanders in the war on terrorism are willing to waste non-terrorists to kill terrorists. Right or wrong, that is not caring about the dignity of every life.

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.

In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (December 1948) in most solemn form, the dignity of a person is acknowledged to all human beings; and as a consequence there is proclaimed, as a fundamental right, the right of free movement in search for truth and in the attainment of moral good and of justice, and also the right to a dignified life.

When the men of antiquity realized their wishes, benefits were conferred by them on the people. If they did not realize their wishes, they cultivated their personal character, and became illustrious in the world. If poor, they attended to their own virtue in solitude; if advanced to dignity, they made the whole empire virtuous as well.

The transformation of nature, a total fusion of science, art and technology in a sublime statement of human dignity and intelligence through the settlements we build for ourselves.

Use every man according to his desert and who should 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity, the less they deserve ... the more merit in your bounty.

Islam does give human dignity, certainly. The point I wanted to make is that it is great foolishness to try to impose our notions of democracy. They have their own traditions.

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?

There is only one terminal dignity - love.

If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.

We have been educated into believing someone else's concept of the deity, and someone else's standard of beauty. You have the right to practice any religion and politics in a way that best suits your freedom, your dignity, and your understanding. And once you do that, you don't apologize.

When who you are and what you are is not decided by any external forces, then you are in dignity.

I'm not saying we're going to win. I am saying rebellion becomes a way to protect your own dignity. Corporations are, theologically speaking, institutions of death. They commodify everything - the natural world, human beings - that they exploit until exhaustion or collapse. They know no limits.

Social security has enabled people to retire with dignity and overwhelmingly not be in poverty. We have to keep it solvent.

Why is it that sometimes our prayers seem not to be answered? This is a manifestation of the Buddha's wisdom, so that we can deepen our prayers, become stronger people, live more profound lives and secure deeper, more lasting good fortune. If our slightest prayer was answered immediately, we would become lazy and degenerate. And we could not hope to build a life of great dignity and substance.

Thought makes the whole dignity of man; therefore endeavor to think well, that is the only morality.

I know our policies work best to lift young men and women up - regardless of their background - so that they can choose their own path and live lives of dignity, purpose, and meaning.

There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.

Be thankful for the smallest blessing and you will deserve to receive greater. Value the least gifts no less than the greatest, and simple graces as especial favors. If you remember the dignity of the Giver, no gift will seem small or mean.

As individuals, we have to act independently of the politics at hand. I don't feel an added responsibility to do anything more beyond being who I've always been and acting decently. I've always felt people are looking down on us and expecting us to fail. That's enough of a burden, and we automatically try to act with dignity.

The true liberty of the press is amply secured by permitting every man to publish his opinion; but it is due to the peace and dignity of society, to inquire into the motives of such publications, and to distinguish between those which are meant for use and reformation, and with an eye solely to the public good, and those which are intended merely to delude and defame. To the latter description, it is impossible that any good government should afford protection and impunity.

Government does best when it helps people help themselves. Human dignity is found not in a handout but in being able to do for one's self.

Women are raised to be the nurturers and steadiers of rocked boats, to hold relationships in place as if our lives depended on it. But it shores up your own dignity and integrity if you're able to say, "There are a million things I love about you, and I want our relationship to continue. I forgive you 95 percent, but not this 5 percent."

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 lawyer must either learn to live more capaciously or be content to find himself continuously less trusted, more circumscribed, till he becomes hardly more important than a minor administrator, confined to a monotonous round of record and routine, without dignity, inspiration, or respect.

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.

Without dignity our lives are only blinks of duration. But if we manage to lead a good life well, we create something more. We write a subscript to our mortality. We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands.

This we take it is the grand characteristic of our age. By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management ofexternal things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages.

Chan Ho had a great career and was the exemplification of class, dignity and character.

Refugee problems may often seem intractable but they are not insoluble. In our experience there are two basic prerequisites for solution: the political will of leaders to tackle the causes and to settle for peace, and international determination to push for peace and then to consolidate it. Consolidating peace means helping societies emerging from war to reintegrate refugees in safety and dignity, to rebuild their institutions - including in the field of justice and human rights - and to resume their economic development.

We lose dignity if we tolerate the intolerable.

Man is clearly made to think. It is his whole dignity and his whole merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. And the order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our Author and our end.

Love is not greedy or self-seeking, but pure, faithful and genuinely free, open to others, respectful of their dignity, seeking their good, radiating joy and beauty.

I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.

You know, Barack Obama is a man of great dignity. And I could tell how much it bothered him and annoyed him that this [birther lie] was being touted and used against him.