Personal Dignity Quotes

Mao appears to be quite free from symptoms of megalomania, but he has a deep sense of personal dignity, and something about him suggests a power of ruthless decision when he deems it necessary.

When we speak of being vulnerable, it suggests being especially vulnerable to pain. People for whom personal dignity and self-sufficiency are everything, do all they can to shut it out. Noli mi tangere. They are well aware that any intimate relationship has pain in it, forces a special kind of awareness, is costly, and so they try to keep themselves unencumbered by shutting pain out as far as it is possible to do so.

America was born out of a desire for self-determination, a longing for the human dignity that only independence can bring.

Work is about more than making a living, as vital as that is. It's fundamental to human dignity, to our sense of self-worth as useful, independent, free people.

Sex divorced from love is the thief of personal dignity.

A man, even if seriously sick or prevented in the exercise of its higher functions, is and will be always a man ... [he] will never become a 'vegetable' or an 'animal,'" the Pope said. "The intrinsic value and personal dignity of every human being does not change depending on their circumstances.

Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness.

A celebrated people lose dignity upon a closer view.

Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.

Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.

Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind's dignity.

I think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing -- his sense of personal dignity.

Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.

Wherever on this planet ideals of personal freedom and dignity apply, there you will find the cultural inheritance of England.

Because we should always respect other nationalities, I have always tried to play them with dignity.

They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.

It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

From the depth of need and despair, people can work together, can organize themselves to solve their own problems and fill their own needs with dignity and strength.

For us democracy is a question of human dignity. And human dignity is political freedom.

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.

When it comes to human dignity, we cannot make compromises.

There is a healthful hardiness about real dignity that never dreads contact and communion with others however humble.

Making a comeback is one of the most difficult things to do with dignity.

Collective freedom provides the basic conditions for people to narrate their own lives, hold power accountable, and embrace a capacious notion of human dignity.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

In two weeks the sheeplike masses of any country can be worked up by the newspapers into such a state of excited fury that men are prepared to put on uniforms and kill and be killed, for the sake of the sordid ends of a few interested parties. Compulsory military service seems to me the most disgraceful symptom of that deficiency in personal dignity from which civilized mankind is suffering today.

The vow of celibacy is a matter of keeping one's word to Christ and the Church. a duty and a proof of the priest's inner maturity; it is the expression of his personal dignity.

Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.

Human dignity is independent of national borders. We must always defend the interests of the poor and the persecuted in other countries.

Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man whose personal dignity went so deep as to be nearly invisible... It was more than diginity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved. The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.

Simplification is one of the most difficult things to do.

The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity.

Let us build bridges, my friends, build bridges to human dignity across that gulf that separates black America from white America.

Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.

Self-respect is the fruit of discipline.

The only kind of dignity which is genuine is that which is not diminished by the indifference of others.

The love of liberty and the sense of human dignity are the basic elements of the Anarchist creed.

The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

Judge Afiuni has suffered enough. She has been subject to acts of violence and humiliations to undermine her human dignity. I am convinced that she must be set free.

The income tax is bad because it was conceived in class hatred, is an instrument of vengeance and plays right into the hands of the communists. It employs the vicious communist principle of taking from each according to his accumulation of the fruits of his labor and giving to others according to their needs, regardless of whether those needs are the result of indolence, or lack of pride, self-respect, personal dignity or other attributes of men.

It is sufficiently evident from many circumstances, that the doctrine of the divinity of Christ did not establish itself without much opposition, especially from the unlearned among the Christians, who thought that it savoured of Polytheism , that it was introduced by those who had had a philosophical education, and was by degrees adopted by others, on account of its covering the great offence of the cross , by exalting the personal dignity of our Saviour.

Love and dignity cannot share the same abode.

Freedom is the open window through which pours the sunlight of the human spirit and human dignity.

In the 21st Century I believe the mission of the United Nations will be defined by a new, more profound, awareness of the sanctity and dignity of every human life, regardless of race or religion.