I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black; it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

At every turn, girls - even the most carefully raised and deeply loved - are surrounded by a popular culture that exhorts them to think of themselves as sexually disposable creatures.

The way I saw it, I was fully capable of being treated with indifference that bordered on disdain while maintaining a strong sense of self-respect. I obeyed his commands, sure that I could fulfill this role while still protecting the sacred place inside of me that I knew deserved more. Different. Better.But that isn't how it works.

[P]eople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.

Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage.

But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind.

Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.

A key barometer to help us weigh the rightness of our actions is self-respect.

You'd be surprised how easy some things can be, things you never thought you'd do, when you take self-respect out of the equation.

Respect for self is the beginning of cultivating virtue in men and women.

Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity growswith the ability to say no to oneself.

Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.