Quotes About Personhood

We do not gain or surrender our personhood as we age. We live one life from conception to death.

You can always tell a person's real character and personhood by those who closely surround him, especially if they're family.

My nurture mother never would have reset me. And I was never a kit. Or a 'female.' I might be a non-human, but I'm not an animal. I'm a girl.

A man who casts no shadow isn't really a man at all.

Men are not potatoes!

The little man is still a man.

To me there is a name for each person. I think it's marvelous to have a name. A woman is not a woman. It's either Gena or my mother or some other person.

Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.

For dehumanization to occur the target group must first be essentialized. They, the others, must be seen as a distinct kind of person: not just superficially different, but radically so. This pattern is borne out by all of the cases of dehumanization that have been surveyed so far in this book.

God has been incredible in creating us to be persons.

I believe that acting is a talent while being a great person encompasses so much more: being a good father, a good husband and the ability to show compassion for others.

Clones are people two.

We are not the person other people wish we were. We are who we decide to be.

When you cure a blind person, he or she is not a statistic.

The modern individual is committed to being successful, not to being a person. He belongs rightly to the 'action generation' whose motto is 'do more but feel less.

The modern individual is committed to being successful, not to being a person.

A movie about a weak, vulnerable woman can be feminist if it shows a real person that we can empathize with.

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.

I don't really picture anyone when I'm drawing. They just become their own completed person with googly eyes.

God has a name. This points to a key difference between persons and things. God is not a nameless energy or abstract idea. — Thomas Oden

When we ask, "Is the fetus a person?" we are asking the same sort of limiting, self-justifying question that the lawyer asked Jesus: "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus, by answering the lawyer's question with this parable, rejects casuistic attempts to circumscribe our moral concern by defining the other as belonging to a category outside the scope of our obligation.

in the same way a person is the same individual as a boy and

the ill, insane, and disabled: all changed, unthinkably, over the centuries, into persons by the law.

Children, women, slaves, aboriginals, the ill, insane, and disabled: all changed, unthinkably, over the centuries, into persons by the law. So why shouldn't trees and eagles and rivers and living mountains be able to sue humans for theft and endless damages? (p. 250)