Daily Inspiration Quote by U Thant

It reads like a moral baseline, but it’s also a quiet piece of diplomatic engineering. U Thant wasn’t offering a Hallmark sentiment; he was laying down the minimum conditions for coexistence in a century that had made mass disrespect a governing principle. As a Burmese statesman and UN Secretary-General in the 1960s, he was speaking from the pressure cooker of decolonization, Cold War proxy battles, and the ongoing aftershocks of World War II. In that context, “of whatever origin, of whatever station” is less poetic repetition than a deliberate inventory of the world’s fault lines: race, nation, class, caste, empire.

The sentence does a clever institutional trick: it makes “respect” sound private and interior (“as we respect ourselves”) while smuggling in a public mandate. If self-respect is treated as a given, then respect for others becomes not charity but consistency. It’s an argument designed to disarm the usual excuses for hierarchy: civilization talk, security talk, development talk. The subtext is pointed: you don’t get to claim dignity for your own people while denying it to someone else’s.

There’s also restraint in the phrasing. No threats, no grand metaphysics, no sermonizing about love. That’s the UN idiom at its best: plain language meant to be repeatable across borders, religions, and ideologies. U Thant’s intent is to make respect feel non-negotiable precisely because it’s framed as ordinary. In a world addicted to status and supremacy, “deserves respect” is a radical leveling device disguised as common sense.