Quotes About Personhood

I don't necessarily think of myself as a feminist, but I'm a whole person.

I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.

But just because we don't think of them as humans doesn't mean they aren't beings. Isn't it even more disrespectful to assume that we're the only species that counts as 'persons'?" The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human.

Grain may rot in the warehouse while hungry people starve because they cannot pay for it. The result is famine for some and diseases of excess for others. The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings: this is a Windigo economy.

even the richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself, and on the other hand even what one might call the poorest personality is everything when he has chosen himself; for the great thing is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and this everyone can be if he wills it.

The majority of men are curtailed I's; what was planned by nature as a possibility capable of being sharpened into an I is soon dulled into a third person.

the identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute

Maybe I'm a human, but I'm a me-and-Ma as well.

Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us." We might paraphrase, saying, "Herein is personhood, not to will autonomously, but to be and to act for the sake of others.

I think of myself as a complete person, not just a football player and athlete.

Tú estabas dotado para mí de eso tan enigmático que poseen los tiranos, cuyo derecho está basado en la propia persona, no en el pensamiento.

Kafka was a master at the gruesome task of picturing people who do not use their potentialities and therefore lose their sense of being persons. The chief character in The Trial and in The Castle has no name—he is identified only by an initial, a mute symbol of one's lack of identity in one's own right.

Just as we should stand against the objectification of women, we too, should stand against dangerous stereotypes that liken men to animals on the prowl, ruled primarily by raging hormones and uncontrollable impulses. This is an insult to principled men who exhibit great respect for women and value them for their personhood, rather than their collective parts.

Un personaggio, signore, può sempre domandare a un uomo chi è. Perché un personaggio ha veramente una vita sua, segnata di caratteri suoi, per cui è sempre «qualcuno». Mentre un uomo – non dico lei, adesso – un uomo così in genere, può non essere «nessuno».

Man is an end in himself.

I want to suggest a pretty radical idea about what family is for. Family is about the forming of persons. Being a person is a gift, like life itself—we are born as human beings made in the image of God. But while in one sense a person is simply what we are as human beings, we are also able to become—to grow in capacities that are only potentially present within us at first. Family shapes us in countless ways. But I want to

People don't become what they were brought up to be, people become themselves. (p.146)

In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others. . . .

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.

But in today's world, being seen as intellectually, cognitively, or developmentally disabled is dangerous because intelligence and verbal communication are entrenched markers of personhood.

When man is not permitted to be himself, he cannot be encountered.

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.

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.

Through the miracle of natural genetic recombination, each child, with the sole exception of an identical twin, is conceived as a unique being. Even the atmosphere of the womb works its subtle changes, and by the time we emerge into the light, we are our own persons.