Quotes About Personhood

Donating sperm was not the same as, say, donating a kidney. Or a retina. It was the passing along of an essence that was inseparable from personhood itself.

An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.

In reality, people are people. Age does a weird thing to your body on the outside. It makes your face fall and weird things happen all over. But inside, you're the same person you always were.

I, insofar as I have an I

Everybody's so busy wanting to be down with the gang. "I'm conservative", "I'm liberal", "I'm conservative". Bullshit! Be a fucking person! Lis-ten! Let it swirl around your head. Then form your opinion. No normal, decent person is one thing, okay? I've got some shit I'm conservative about, I've got some shit I'm liberal about. Crime, I'm conservative. Prostitution, I'm liberal!

to be a person is to be constantly engaged in making yourself into that person

Modern cultures restrict personhood to human beings, a selfish and dangerous contraction of awareness and sympathy. Primal cultures distribute personhood throughout nature. In such societies, animals and plants, even mountains and rivers, are spoken of as being people-beings with status equal to the status of human beings. Everything in nature has sentiment and purpose.

An emotionally destructive marriage is one where one's personhood, dignity, and freedom of choice is regularly denied, criticized, or crushed. This can be done through words, behaviors, economics, attitudes, and misusing the Scriptures.

There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.

It was NINETY-SIXTY-FIVE-NINETY PERSON ME!" Cliff objected.

It's exceedingly difficult to see how we move from a valueless series of causes and effects from the big bang onward, finally arriving at valuable, morally responsible, rights-bearing human beings. If we're just material beings produced by a material universe, then objective value or goodness (not to mention consciousness or reasoning powers or beauty or personhood) can't be accounted for.

I have seen evil and I know its ploy: to steal your personhood, your singular God-given identity.

That a person who did something for somebody's gratitude was more like a 2-D cutout image of a person than a bona fide person.

Every specific human being, however, thinks, judges, imagines, wills and expresses himself or herself in a unique, dissimilar, and unrepeatable mode--a mode of unpredictable difference, or otherness, which objectively defies description or delimitation.

Forgive me but I'm going to keep talking about me who am unknown to myself, and as I write I'm a bit surprised because I discover I have a destiny. Who hasn't ever wondered: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

Until now finding myself was already having an idea of a person and fitting myself into it: I'd incarnate myself into this organized person and didn't even feel the great effort of construction that is living.

Ein Individuum, das sich nicht in einen bürgerlichen Zustand zwingen [lässt], [kann] den Segnungen des Begriffs "Person" nicht teilhaftig werden.

I always liked you. I should have said something, but I'm not a good person. I'm not even sure I'm a person at all." "Oh." Surprised, Charlie took his hand and folded her fingers through his. They were surprisingly solid. "You're a person. You're my person." He bent down to bring their clasped hands to his lips.

My mother was a real person. I am not a real person.

The logic against them could not be more elementary. First, the unborn entity is an actual being, it is alive. If this were not so, there would be no need for an abortion. The very purpose of the abortion is to kill that which is alive. Second, this being is human. What else could it be? Feline? Canine? Bovine? As Congressman Henry Hyde once quipped, "No woman has ever given birth to a Golden Retriever." Human beings give birth to human beings.

We talk about characters in literature as though they were built on the model of the real person, but then I often think that the way we present ourselves as real people is based heavily on the way literary psychologies are stylized, and I wonder how the two forms of realistic personhood feed on or fulfill each other.

You matter because you are you and there is no other person in this world who could ever take your place.

Is it true that there is no morally significant dividing line between fertilized egg and child? Those commonly suggested are: birth, viability, quickening and the onset of consciousness.

In the absence of any general inference from 'A is a potential X' to 'A has the rights of an X', we should not accept that a potential person should have the rights of a person, unless we can be given some specific reason why this should hold in this particular case.