Indignity Quotes

#1. They warn us when we're kids that we're going to have to suffer, but they neglect to mention the indignity. What self-respecting fetus, if shown its future as a proctology patient, boot-camp recruit, or game show contestant, would still elect to be born?

Tom Robbins

#2. Thresholds of pain, indignity and incapacity are entirely personal.

Polly Toynbee

#3. Daniel understood the complaint. For Daniel, too, had once designed a building, and savored the thrill of seeing it built, only to endure the long indignity of watching the owner clutter it up with knick-knacks and furniture.

Neal Stephenson

#4. The ultimate indignity is to be given a bedpan by a stranger who calls you by your first name.

Maggie Kuhn

#5. I'm talking about the kind of indignity that changes you as a person, makes you withdraw, hide from the world because suddenly it's turned into something frightening - full of dark corners and monsters.

S. Walden

#6. It's indignity you can't stand, Hannibal, you're like a cat that way.

Thomas Harris

#7. It had not occurred to me that it would get this bad, that indignity would dance upon bloodshed.

Miranda July

#8. He was not the Empire - not every moment of oppression and indignity and torment she had ever suffered. He was an Imperial, a petty, spiteful, scared little man who'd forgotten his own atrocities.

Alexander Freed

#9. They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions. (v)

Elie Wiesel

#10. The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal - that you can gather votes like box tops - is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.

Adlai E. Stevenson

#11. I wouldn't go out of my way to experience the indignity of middle-age just because it might be good meat for a story.

Roddy Doyle

#12. There was in it a moment of indignity, nearly comedic - a feeling that I had lost my balance. But I had not.

Elizabeth Berg

#13. Survival often feels like an indignity.

Guillermo Del Toro

#14. I know that there are people who believe that if they get to the stage where life is absolutely intolerable because of pain and indignity ... they would like to end their life before nature intended, and we think they should have the choice to do so.

Margo MacDonald

#15. What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament?

Herman Melville

#16. Back into your box, anonymous Yorick, with your sutured eyes and frozen scream! The indignity of your internment is no worse than ours.

Rick Yancey

#17. Moral contempt is a far greater indignity and insult than any kind of crime.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#18. Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness. If we think of resting from our labours, it is only in order to return to them.
In thinking so highly of work we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so. For nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity.

John N. Gray

#19. Wearing shoes in the house was barbaric. There was almost as much indignity in wearing shoes in the house as there was in being kidnapped.

Ann Patchett

#20. I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since.

Stephen Fry

#21. Caratacus suffered the double indignity of being taken to Rome in chains and having an opera written about him by Elgar.

Ben Aaronovitch

#22. Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted.

Max Lerner

#23. With patience and calm, persistence and stoicism, good handwriting and careful labeling, they would meet persecution, indignity, and hardship head-on.

Michael Chabon

#24. You'd think you'd been singled out of all the women in the world for this crowning indignity." "What if I do!" she cried angrily. "It isn't an indignity for them. It's their one excuse for living. It's the one thing they're good for. It is an indignity for me.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#25. To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

George Santayana

#26. I did get upset once, when we were hiking between pitches 15 and 16. Two women and a dog were trying to find their way down through the maze of trails below the First Summit and they asked us: 'Are you on the trail?' I let my indignity show: 'NO, we're on a CLIMB!'

Andy Cairns

#27. There is dignity in your being even if there's indignity in what you're doing.

Tariq Ramadan

#28. Our thoughts of literary renaissance should always center themselves on the removal of superstition, meanness, indignity and ignorance.

Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

#29. An algorithm of infinite symmetry, life serving death by expanding its bounty, furthering its reach. Did the perpetrators appreciate their satire? Yes, it was practical, indignity as revenge, but for what?

Philip Schultz

#30. What was that? Rich combined the pain of a crooked arm with the indignity of a flicked ear. I could only hope the situation didn't escalate to the dreaded purple nurple.

Molly Harper

#31. We now undertake that we cannot rest while millions of our people suffer the pain and indignity of poverty in all its forms.

Nelson Mandela

#32. So if God is forgotten, we want to join God in being forgotten. So if God is rejected and opposed and misunderstood and misrepresented, we want to suffer each indignity and sorrow with God.

Brian D. McLaren

#33. I am a Catholic. As far as possible I go to Mass every day. This is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative!

Hilaire Belloc

#34. The indignity of your fate is the will of one more powerful.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#35. I can spare a dime, brother, but in these morally inflationary times, a dime goes a lot farther if it's demanding work rather than adding to the indignity of relief.

Phil Ochs

#36. To lese-majeste and contempt of court, we must add the crime of lese-million, that fearful indignity we visit on the rich when we expose the impotence of gold.

Honore De Balzac

#37. To me, a world which thinks of itself in terms of puny, squalid, bickering little nations and not as one glorious field for the crusade of mankind is a world in which to succeed is the highest indignity that ca befall a good man, it is a world in which geed men are shut up like gods in a lavatory.

Michael Arlen

#38. Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don't you agree?

Gregory Maguire

#39. Escape was impossible. Victory even more so. Wulfgar's only thought and desire at that moment was to be spared the indignity and anguish of lycanthropy. Then Drizzt entered the room.

R.A. Salvatore

#40. There has been enough suffering in our country, there has been enough of children whose dreams die before they have a chance to grow and there has been enough of our elders who, having served their nation, are forced into indignity in their old age.

John Agyekum Kufuor

#41. The indignity of it!-
With everything blooming above me,
Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses,
Whole fields lovely and inviolate,-
Me down in the fetor of weeds,
Crawling on all fours,
Alive, in a slippery grave.

Theodore Roethke

#42. She glimpsed the sexless mounds between their legs and shuddered. For some reason, she found their lack of genitals uncannily obscene, an indignity, a piece of humanity they had been denied.

Jason Heller

#43. Nobody ever dies of an indignity.

Elizabeth Bowen

#44. So this additional indignity will be inflicted upon you. It means, I believe, that humans will not end here, but may rise again - fight again. Humans are always warriors.

Greg Bear

#45. For our sin God had visited our bodies with the gruesome ignominy of rot and decay, there was no indignity in the same body's receiving

Thomas Mann

#46. It seems quite proper to fear achievement, which, after all, is proof that you've successfully moved an experience from the delightfully anticipated future into the forever and sadly lost past. Avoid as long as you can the ultimate indignity: a lifetime achievement award.

Terry Rossio

#47. When fate and love come into conflict, the former must always win; for love will fade if it rests upon indignity or abdication.

Jorge G. Castaneda

#48. Indignation must always be the answer to indignity. Reality is not destiny.

Eduardo Galeano

#49. What is the natural reaction when told you have a hopeless mental illness? That diagnosis does you in; that, and the humiliation of being there. I mean, the indignity you're subjected to. My God.

Kate Millett

#50. [Humans'] capacity to intervene, to compare, to judge, to decide, to choose, to desist makes them capable of acts of greatness, of dignity, and, at the same time, of the unthinkable in terms of indignity.

Paulo Freire

#51. Why were things funny? Was God laughing at us? Or was laughter the dispensation of God? Maybe laughter itself was Godlike. When we laugh, we rise above pain. We rise above indignity. We even rise above incredulity. We "get it." Maybe in the way God "gets it.

Richard Tillotson

#52. To the proud the slightest repulse or disappointment is the last indignity.

William Hazlitt

#53. The golden rule of relationships is "Cause no indignity." A loving relationship is one in which both partners take care to protect each other's dignity. A wounded soul heals more slowly than a wounded body, so it is as important to avoid indignity as it is to avoid outright harm.

Robert W. Fuller

#54. It's not the cost (although that pinches), or the time (though that grinds). After a while, it's the sheer galling indignity of being asked to prove, pay, and prove all over again that you're a worthy parent. Any true parent will tell you that that is impossible to prove in advance.

Scott Simon

#55. Human beings in there took turns standing or lying down. The legs of those who stood were like fence posts driven into a warm, squirming, farting, sighing earth. The queer earth was a mosaic of sleepers who nestled like spoons.

Kurt Vonnegut