Though the captives’ resistance was dangerous, through such acts, dignity was preserved, and through dignity, life itself.

I am in an altogether new world now. I can think of nothing more wonderful. It is a real touch of all that heaven means.

Louie was furious at the sharks. He had thought that they had an understanding:The men would stay out of the sharks’ turf – the water – and the sharks would stay off of theirs –...

We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back,” he said. “I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.

She dressed in bohemian clothes, penned novels, panted, and yearned to roam forgotten corners of the world. She was habitually defiant and fearless, and when she felt controlled, as she often did, she could be...

He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books….The books were the...

Without dignity, identity is erased.

Wonderful?” wrote J.O. Young in his diary. “To stand cheering, crying, waving your hat and acting like a damn fool in general. No one who has spent all but 16 days of the this war...

…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...

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer. In seeking the Bird’s...

Louie found the raft offered an unlikely intellectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the...

I just thought I was empty and now I’m being filled…and I just wanted to keep being filled.

Finally, I wish to remember the millions of Allied servicemen and prisoners of war who lived the story of the Second World War. Many of these men never came home; many others returned bearing emotional...

On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil leared a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people. Dignity is as essential...

ALL HE COULD SEE, IN EVERY DIRECTION, WAS WATER. It was June 23, 1943. Somewhere on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier and Olympic runner Louie Zamperini lay across a...

A fantastically huge, roiling cloud, glowing bluish gray, swaggered over the city. It was more than three miles tall. Below it Hiroshima was boiling.

Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past...

Such beauty, he thought, was too perfect to have come about by mere chance. That day in the center of the Pacific was, to him, a gift crafted deliberately, compassionately, for him and Phil. Joyful...