Quotes About Personhood

I think there are a very few pro-lifers who would say that a zygote in a petri dish is the equivalent of you or me; it's just younger. If you can say that without laughing, maybe you are a true pro-lifer. But I think most people are able or willing to make distinctions that show they maybe don't quite believe that.

Suppose that 'Unsolved Mysteries' called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people - like the lost identical twin, only younger than you.

But, the truth is that everyone is somebody already.

I want to know who you are as a person, and then I want you to develop as a whole human being.

God could have created us to be automatons who were always choosing the right side, making the right decision. It is an incredible thing, God said "I want persons" who therefore have freedom.

People want to be thought of as something other than a source of money. They want to be thought of as creative, thinking people.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not.

I am a person. I am not a soap opera.

Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.

How can anyone love someone who is less than a full person, unless love itself is domination per se?

Is beauty really sex? Does a woman's sexuality correspond to what she looks like? Does she have the right to sexual pleasure and self-esteem because she's a person, or must she earn that right through beauty, as she used to through marriage?

You know there is a person inside every baby, right? And anybody who has ever met a baby knows there is already a person in there.

Mickey is his own person.

since 1886, the Bill of Rights has been explicitly applied to corporations. Perhaps most astoundingly, no branch of the U.S. government ever formally enacted corporate personhood "rights": • The public never voted on it. • It was never enacted into law by any legislature. • It was never even stated by a decision after arguments before the Supreme Court.

for one hundred years people have believed that the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad did in fact conclude that "corporations are persons." But this book will show that the Court never stated this: it was added by the court reporter who wrote the introduction to the decision, a commentary called a headnote.

Every person is a unique and autonomous person and actually, considered independently, the greatest artwork of all time...

humble realization of our mysterious being as persons in whom God dwells, with infinite sweetness and inalienable power.

Poetry is the smallest way – it is a small, small way, but it is a way indeed – that the individual body can express its own personhood and value in the face of faceless systems.

it is possible that we are the only persons,> said another robot.

What would happen if we who call ourselves Christians were as driven to share our lives with God as we are to debate theology? Do we, after all, propose to win the world over by flawless theology - or by presenting to them a flawless Person?

Recent scholarship has recognized that such terms as body, soul, and spirit are not different, separable faculties of each individual but different ways of viewing the whole person.

In the U.K. - correct me if I'm wrong - there is a legal definition of 'not being in possession of yourself' aka 'not being a person.' That's the fun thing: someone such as a lawyer needs to define, using some empirical signal, something supposedly transcendental like 'person,' something lawyers argue and argue about regarding, say, chimps in zoos.

Where there is no capacity to affirm another as a person in his own right, there is no love. There is only masked fear.

There is a secret person undamaged in every individual.