51 Quotes About Personhood

We cannot justify treating any sentient nonhuman as our property, as a resource, as a thing that we an use and kill for our purposes.

Who among us is not the great I AM? Who among us doesn't live in a nightgown or some other bare-ass outfit at the center of his own wide sky--shining, unchanging, without beginning or end, a word in the east and a body in the west?

It would be wise to define ‘living’ as walking in the fullest expression of who I am, verses wallowing in the confines of who I’m not.

We think of dogs as being more like people than pigs; but pigs are highly intelligent animals and if we kept pigs as pets and reared dogs for food, we would probably reverse our order of preference. Are we turning persons into bacon?

God allows us to believe that we do not have a soul, because it is in living in the emptiness that we are ‘not’ that we become convinced of the fullness that we ‘are.

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.

I stood, in shame and confusion, seeing for the first time despite my anger a different picture of Evie in her life-long struggle to be clean and sweet. It was as if this object of frustration and desire had suddenly acquired the attributes of a person rather than a thing...

Women are also property in our bible; adultery is a property crime in the Old Testament, not a sex crime.

The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding women of their duty. There is no need to make everything so personal, Margaret. You make everything into your own tragedy.