Dignity

Dignity is defined as the quality or state of being worthy, honored, or esteemed. 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. Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live. Apartheid was a clear case of direct attacks on individuals’ dignity and this was not limited to a few individuals but on multiple generations of native South Africans. How an individual reacts when his or her dignity is violated. The most common reaction is to keep reliving the torment through flashes and nightmares and eventually convincing oneself that the only way out is to seek revenge. Loss of dignity is a gradual loss of individuality.

• The saddest thing in the world is not poverty per se; it's loss of dignity.
• Those at the bottom of the economic ladder lack dignity, and it is the job of the rest of the world to help give it to them.
• Some of the poorest people are the most dignified. And some of the richest lack dignity. If I fail to treat someone with dignity, it is me, not them, who is undignified.
• Extreme poverty is undignified – sometimes communities or individuals do find themselves helpless and in need of crisis or ongoing assistance. Whether in city or countryside, very poor people tend to work for a better life.
• Former president of Haiti Jean-Bertrand Aristide has pleaded “help rebuild the country, moving from misery to poverty with dignity".
• Amartya Sen (and others) defined development as freedom rather than just economic or social progress, and the concept of dignity takes us a step further along that road.
• It is said that if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. While most poverty measures are disputed, dignity is perhaps the one thing that humans across the globe, in myriad different contexts, most instinctively recognize and long for.
• Dying with dignity is the greatest shift in morality in this generation. If a person is diagnosed with a terrible terminal illness, or is in intolerable pain, why force that person to suffer? There is a big difference between suicide, euthanasia, and dying with dignity. Suicide is self-inflicted. Euthanasia is ending life without consent. Dying with dignity is neither suicide nor euthanasia; it is respect for the individual. An adult who, for very good reasons, consents to die should have that right. Frostbite would not be a good reason. 
• Each person has a sense of worth or value, sense of the price of his personality, his dignity. Personality, dignity, is the center of attention in people’s relationships. Demeaning of dignity is almost the only reason for conflict. Those who lost it are humiliated.
• The genuine price of a man is the truth about him. Everything that increases a man’s dignity is goodness, everything that decreases it – evil. 
• Internal freedom is freedom from fear of being judged, of being charged a low price, and freedom from doubts about dignity. The only fear an internally free man has is fear of going against his conscience. Society knows freedom when its people know dignity.