Quotes about dignity

Honor and honesty, compassion and truth are good even if they kill you, for they alone give life its dignity and worth. (Ch. 24)

“There’s this thing called dignity that some cats have been known to have. You might want to look into it.”

“A cat is always dignified, no matter what position he finds himself in,” Ashes said. “A half-cat even more so.”

The social effects of colonialism are to degrade and to dehumanize the subjected black man.

Nnaife did not realise that Dr Meers's laughter was inspired by that type of wickedness that reduces any man, white or black, intelligent or not, to a new low; lower than the basest of animals, for animals at least respected each other's feelings, each other's dignity.

I was soon surrounded by strange men, who examined and handled me in the same manner that a butcher would a calf or a lamb he was about to purchase, and who talked about my shape and size in like words—as if I could no more understand their meaning than the dumb beasts. I was then put up for sale. The bidding commenced at a few pounds, and gradually rose to fifty seven, when I was knocked down to the highest bidder; and the people who stood by said that I had fetched a great sum for so young a slave.

When hard times come to the party, dignity is one of the first guests to leave.

As I listened I thought once again how precarious was the existence of the Bedu.  Their way of life naturally made them fatalists; so much was beyond their control.  It was impossible for them to provide for a morrow when everything depended on a chance fall of rain or when raiders, sickness, or any one of a hundred chance happenings might at any time leave them destitute, or end their lives. They did what they could, and no people were more self-reliant, but if things went wrong they accepted their fate without bitterness, and with dignity as the will of God.

He had never done any good, but he had always carried himself like a duke, and like a duke he carried himself to the end.

“Dignity is like morality,” Mirabilis barked. “Too much is as bad as too little.”

But when she tried to say something, the words always seemed trite and inadequate. Nothing measured up. When any moment might be their last, there was nothing she could ever imagine saying that had the necessary dignity to fill that instant. Silence was better. Silence had its own dignity.

"Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was. Here you can be something. Here's a place to build a home. It isn't the land-there's always more land. it's the idea that we all have value, you and me, we're worth something more than the dirt. I never saw dirt I'd die for, but I'm not asking you to come join us and fight for dirt. What we're all fighting for, in the end, is each other."

...let us sell our labour for what it is worth. And if an industry cannot buy our labour, let that industry die. But let us not sell our labour cheap to keep an industry alive.