“Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had”

Daily Telegram #1172, Will Rogers Sees No Value In All The Time We Save (28 April 1930)
Daily telegrams

Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.
Think and Grow Rich (1938)

Podcast Series 2 Episode 2
On Life

Source: Fourth Realm Trilogy (2005-2009), The Traveler (2005), Ch. 31

Dawkins has stated on many occasions that this passage will be read at his funeral.
Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)
Context: We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

Source: Japan knife attack shows disabled persons 'have to be protected' https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/34269/japan-knife-attack-shows-disabled-persons-have-to-be-protected (July 29, 2016)

Stone River Enters Stanford University's Outdoor Art Collection http://ccva.stanford.edu/Goldsworthy.html (4 September 2001)