Daily Inspiration Quote by Jack Kevorkian

Demeaning, here, is doing heavy lifting. Kevorkian isn’t merely confessing a personal preference; he’s drawing a hard, even cruel boundary around what kinds of work deserve respect. Coming from an activist famous for reframing assisted suicide as “mercy,” the line exposes a hierarchy he rarely had to name outright: some forms of bodily labor are treated as morally and socially low, while others (even those involving death) can be cast as principled, courageous, or intellectually elevated.

The intent feels defensive and strategic. Kevorkian spent his public life insisting he wasn’t a grim opportunist but a crusader against hypocrisy in medicine and law. By invoking toilet-cleaning, he reaches for a universally legible symbol of “dirty work” - labor associated with invisibility, stigma, and class. The subtext: I am not a servant; I am not here to do society’s mess-management. It’s a bid to preserve dignity on his own terms, even as he argued for dignity at the end of life for others.

That’s the irony. Kevorkian’s project hinged on empathy for people reduced to bodies: pain, decline, dependence. Yet this remark casually diminishes workers whose jobs are literally about caring for the shared body of public space. In a culture that praises “essential workers” in crisis and ignores them in normal times, the quote lands as an unintentional tell: the fight for dignity can still carry blind spots, especially when dignity is defined by distance from grime, service, and the people who do it.