Quotes About Personhood

Women, ever since there have been women, have had a way of being people.

The only question left to be settled now is are women persons?

People don't want to be projects.

I'm just me, a normal person.

I didn't want to be a number. I didn't want to be an object.

He was much more useful as a name and a story than he would ever be as an inconvenient flesh-and-blood person.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

The Master said, "The gentleman does not serve as a vessel." (Analects 2.12)

The authoritative person is a model that others, recognizing the achievement, gladly and without coercion, defer to and appropriate in the construction of their own personhood. Confucius is as explicit in expressing the same reservations about authoritative relations becoming authoritarian as he is about a deference-driven ritualized community surrendering this noncoercive structure for the rule of law

We need serious strategic and tactical thinking about how to create new models of leadership and forge the kind of persons to actualize these models.

I was me, Hillary, but I also was a vessel and a proxy.

A simple separate person is not contained between his hat and his boots.

Vosotros no sois ganado, no sois máquinas, sois Hombres.

The more of a person we succeed in making a child, the better will he both fulfil his own life and serve society.

The only thing I need to take personally is my person.

Hume's notion that we are nothing but a bundle of sensations succeeding one another with inconceivable rapidity, that any coherent sense of personhood is hence sort of overarching fiction, a state of affairs that may or may not be the case on average.

I feel strongly that in the continual striving for the actualization of every living thing lies our only hope. This is the unique challenge of Personhood and the sole purpose of this book.

I just don't feel like I've seen very many movies about 17-year-old girls where the question is not, 'Will she find the right guy' or 'Will he find her?' The question should be, 'Is she going to occupy her personhood?' Because I think we're very unused to seeing female characters, particularly young female characters, as people.

I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist...I am a person who does those things.

And once you cease to be a real person, you stop being a good actor.

Now an embryo may seem like some scientific or laboratory term, but in fact the embryo contains the unique information that defines a person. All you add is food and climate control, and some time, and the embryo becomes you or me.

Would you really have married the man who'd killed your brothers? Well, first of all, I wouldn't have been given a choice. But yes, probably. Yes. I was a slave, and a slave will do anything, anything at all, to stop being a thing and become a person again. I just don't know how you could do that. Well, no, of course you don't. You've never been a slave.

the intention of God is that we should each become the kind of person whom he can set free in his universe, empowered to do what we want to do. Just as we desire and intend this, so far as possible, for our children and others we love, so God desires and intends it for his children. But character, the inner directedness of the self, must develop to the point where that is possible.

What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are?