51 Quotes About Personhood

Mother, before God," I say, my voice shaking with tears, "I swear that I have to believe that there is more for me in life than being wife to one man after another, and hoping not to die in childbirth!

There was nothing fake or added about him. He was all himself.

If someone's personhood is in doubt (or seen as lacking), all the easier to direct death wishes at them. When a tiny minority of them transgresses, their crimes of violence only confirm their abjection from the human [. . .] Anxiety, threat, dread, fear, and prejudice feed into the explanatory mechanisms that construct them as somehow beyond human, beyond mercy.

Society: Beware of missing persons.

To respond to the call of the other is to be a full and active human being.

Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.

All his life he had managed in such ways to disconnect himself from things which he couldn't escape and which threatened to define him in a way in which he didn't want to be defined, and go on untouched, untouched by things that should have touched him, hurt him, burned him.

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.

To your mind, feelings are what create a person, something unwilling, something wild vandalizing whatever the skull holds. Those sensations form a someone. The headaches begin then.