Decent Life Quotes:

If there is a God, you owe him far more than a morally decent life.

- Timothy Keller

source: Timothy Keller (2013). “Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life's Biggest Questions”, p.30, Penguin

topic: If There Is A God, Decent, Decent Life

In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

- Abraham Lincoln

topic: Inspirational, Life, Motivational, Life Wisdom, Live Life To Its Fullest

Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life . . .

- Nelson Mandela

source: Twitter post from Jan 21, 2016

topic: Justice, Fundamentals, Charity, Hunger And Poverty, Hunger Poverty

Can we really believe that we are living a good life, an ethically decent life if we don't do anything serious to help reduce poverty around the world and help save the lives of children or adults who are likely to die if we don't increase the amount of aid we are giving.

- Peter Singer

topic: Children, Good Life, Believe, Living The Good Life, Decent Life

Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people.

- Robert Higgs

topic: People, Income, Adequate, Income Inequality, Decent Life

I decided that I was ready to assume this position when I discovered that the chance to save the country was very meager. I was prepared to sacrifice myself for this country and its 90 million people. They want food, fuel and electricity and yearn for a decent life. Any president who does not pay attention to such details or is unable to provide the minimum level of stability should leave office.

- Abdel Fattah el-Sisi

source: Source: www.spiegel.de

topic: Country, Sacrifice, People, Decent Life

There is not way that you can have a decent life as a man if you aren't awake and aware every moment. Show up for your own life. Don't pass your days in a stupor, content to swallow whatever watery ideas modern society may bottle feed you through the media, satisfied to slumber through life in an instant gratification sugar coma. The most extraordinary gift you've been given is your own humanity, which is about consciousness. So honor that consciousness.

- Eustace Conway

topic: Men, Media, Ideas, Coma, Decent Life

Like the character I played in Jekyll, we all have different masks we put on for different occasions. As much as we all want to lead decent lives, we're also attracted by the idea that something dark may lurk within us,

- James Nesbitt

source: "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

topic: Character, Dark, Ideas, Jekyll, Decent Life

These are things I'd never seen before, they were very disturbing and they were very compelling to try and do something to change the situation for the animals. Farm animals are providing us with the food to stay alive, so I think we really owe them a decent life while they are alive.

- Jan Cameron

topic: Animal, Thinking, Trying, Decent Life, Staying Alive

We owe them [animals] a decent life and a decent death, and their lives should be as low-stress as possible. That's my job. I wish animals could have more than just a low-stress life and a quick, painless death. I wish animals could have a good life, too, with something useful to do. People were animals, too, once, and when we turned into human beings we gave something up. Being close to animals brings some of it back.

- Temple Grandin

topic: Jobs, Good Life, Stress, Decent Life

The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge. They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than in the present one. Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential if a decent life is to be provided for every human being.

- John Holdren

source: "White House Science Adviser Advocated 'De-Development' of the United States" by Christopher Neefus, www.cnsnews.com. July 28, 2009.

topic: Design, Challenges, Essentials, Decent Life, Redistribution Of Wealth

The great question for our time is, how to make sure that the continuing scientific revolution brings benefits to everybody rather than widening the gap between rich and poor. To lift up poor countries, and poor people in rich countries, from poverty, to give them a chance of a decent life, technology is not enough. Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.

- Freeman Dyson

topic: Country, Technology, People, Decent Life, Poor Countries

A new era will dawn in Africa, when the impoverished masses of a nation rise up to rescue their right to a decent life from the hands of the ruling oligarchies.

- Che Guevara

topic: Hands, Dawn, Oligarchy, Decent Life

don't let anything make you believe that there are not as many decent men in the world as women, and they're just as decent. Life isn't worth living unless you know that - and it's true.

- Dorothy Canfield Fisher

source: Eliot Wigginton (1986). “Sometimes a Shining Moment: The Foxfire Experience”, Doubleday

topic: Believe, Men, World, Decent Life, Decent Man

It is important that our relationship with farm animals is reciprocal. We owe animals a decent life and a painless death. I have observed that the people who are completely out of touch with nature are the most afraid of death.

- Temple Grandin

topic: Nature, Animal, People, Afraid Of Death, Decent Life

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

- Mohsin Hamid

topic: Self, Helping, Sufi, Decent Life

There was no way to have a decent life and to be gay. So I was terrified that I was going to be caught, and I had already experienced quite a bit of bullying. And, you know, I just thought that only misery lay ahead, and that if I - when I got caught that would be the solution. I wish I could say that was a thing of the past. But, you know, it's not.

- Cleve Jones

source: "LGBTQ Activist Cleve Jones: 'I'm Well Aware How Fragile Life Is'". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, kccu.org. November 29, 2016.

topic: Bullying, Gay, Past, Decent Life

Sustainable development is not an option! It is the only path that allows all of humanity to share a decent life on this, one planet. Rio+20 gives our generation the opportunity to choose this path.

- Sha Zukang

topic: Opportunity, Our Generation, Giving, Decent Life, Rio

The proclamation of the Gospel is destined primarily to the poor, to those who often lack the essentials for a decent life. The good news is first announced to them, that God loves them before all others and comes to visit them through the acts of charity that the disciples of Christ carry out in his name.

- Pope Francis

topic: Names, Essentials, News, Good News, Decent Life

Of all the characteristics needed for both a happy and morally decent life, none surpasses gratitude. Grateful people are happier, and grateful people are more morally decent.

- Dennis Prager

topic: Gratitude, Grateful, People, Decent Life

For half of the world's population, roughly three billion people around the world living on less than two dollars a day, an election is at best a means, not an end; a starting point, not deliverance. These people are looking less for an "electocracy" than for the basic elements that for most of us define a decent life--food, shelter, electricity, basic health care, education for their children, and the ability to make their way through life without having to endure corruption, violence, or arbitrary power.

- Barack Obama

source: Barack Obama (2007). “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream”, p.317, Canongate Books

topic: Children, Mean, Two, Decent Life

They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever...and the other one scared me out of my mind.

- Frederik Pohl

source: "Gateway". Book by Frederik Pohl, April 1977.

topic: Giving Up, Two, Choices, Decent Life

What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand. I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.

- Jodi Picoult

source: Jodi Picoult (2012). “The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules”, p.788, Simon and Schuster

topic: Land, Evil, Healthy, Took For Granted, Decent Life

You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.

- Kazuo Ishiguro

source: Kazuo Ishiguro (2009). “Never Let Me Go”, p.74, Faber & Faber

topic: Lying, Needs, Never Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Decent Life

No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction -- toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.

- Hunter S. Thompson

topic: Men, Matter, Anarchy, Decent Life, Judas

The people who keep asking if they can't lead a decent life without Christ, don't know what life is about; if they did they would know that 'a decent life' is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for.

- C. S. Lewis

source: C. S. Lewis (2014). “God in the Dock”, p.113, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

topic: Men, People, Asking, Decent Life

A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States...De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation...Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided for every human being.

- John Holdren

topic: Mean, Reality, America, Decent Life, Redistribution Of Wealth

What we have done with the American Indian is its way as bad as what we imposed on the Negroes. We took a proud and independent race and virtually destroyed them. We have to find ways to bring them back into decent lives in this country.

- Richard M. Nixon

topic: Country, Independent, Race, Decent Life

You've got a generation of young men - almost all are young men - in situations of great economic hardship, where they don't really have work. The chances of them making a decent life for themselves, of making a family, living in a kind of decent, happy way, are very, very remote. It's very hard for them to ever even have that as a dream, so when people are that deprived of the ordinary hope of human beings, it creates anger. And that anger can be channeled by unscrupulous persons, whether secular or religious leaders, and there's been a lot of that.

- Salman Rushdie

source: Source: www.teachingbooks.net

topic: Dream, Religious, Men, Decent Life, Religious Leaders

In the evaluation of the dominant moods of any historical period it is important to hold fast to the fact that there are always islands of self-sufficient order — on farms and in castles, in homes, studies, and cloisters — where sensible people manage to live relatively lusty and decent lives: as moral as they must be, as free as they may be, and as masterly as they can be. If we only knew it, this elusive arrangement is happiness.

- Erik Erikson

source: "Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History".

topic: Decent Life, Places Of Peace

It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught.

- Katherine Boo

source: Katherine Boo (2012). “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum”, p.13, Portobello Books

topic: People, Malaria, Fortune, Decent Life

I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we've got to do it right. We've got to give those animals a decent life and we've got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.

- Temple Grandin

source: "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

topic: Thinking, Animal, Giving, Decent Life

What really happened in Vietnam was- all these things are away games for the American military. We're not on our home turf, which means to succeed there has to be a partner. And the definition of partnership is someone willing to risk their lives in their home area to prevail because they think it's necessary to build a decent life and a better life for their people.

- William J. Clinton

source: Source: www.nbcnews.com

topic: Military, Home, Mean, Decent Life, Turf

You can't criticize people for wanting to have a decent life or wanting to live decently.

- Angela Davis

source: PBS Interview, www.pbs.org. 1997.

topic: People, Criticize, Decent, Decent Life

Everyone working 40 hrs a week should have a shot at a decent life.

- Joe Biden

topic: Should Have, Week, Shots, Decent Life

Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.

- Salman Rushdie

topic: Country, Men, Ideas, Decent Life

For that reason the simple test of the slogan 'Consume Less' as a basis for social action on the environment would be to tell it to the blacks in the ghetto. The message will not be very well received for there are many people in this country who consume less than is needed to sustain a decent life.

- Barry Commoner

topic: Country, Ghetto, Simple, Decent Life, Social Action