When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights.
Interpretation
Ignoring human dignity leads to the neglect of human rights.
This quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton emphasizes the fundamental connection between human dignity and human rights. It suggests that when individuals or societies fail to recognize and respect the inherent worth of people, they inevitably start to overlook and violate the rights that safeguard that dignity, leading to a dangerous cycle that undermines the fabric of a just society.
In practice
During a human rights conference, this quote can be used to highlight the importance of respecting human dignity.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
All things flourish, and each returns to its source.
Fate is the raw materials of experience. They come uninvited and often unanticipated. Destiny is what a man does with these raw materials.
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.
Cinna wishes to seem poor, and is poor
The things of this world take up too much of my time, of which indeed I have too little left, to undertake anything like a reformation in religion.
Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite.
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