Personhood Quotes

“A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.”
― Djuna Barnes

“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.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“He lost his Self a thousand times and for days on end he dwelt in non-being. But although the paths took him away from Self, in the end they always led back to it. Although Siddhartha fled from the Self a thousand times, dwelt in nothing, dwelt in animal and stone, the return was inevitable; the hour was inevitable when he would again find himself in sunshine or in moonlight, in shadow or in rain, and was again Self and Siddhartha, again felt the torment of the onerous life cycle.”
― Herman Hesse, Siddhartha: An Indian Tale

“Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“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. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing _Ender's Game_, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective--the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adult's. ... _Ender's Game_ asserts the personhood of children, and those who are used to thinking of children in another way ... are going to find _Ender's Game_ a very unpleasant place to live.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“what was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for. it was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn’t wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous.

The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“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.”
― GaryLFrancione

“Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.”
― Dorothy Allison

“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?”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“There are at least two ways to believe in the idea of quality. You can believe there's something ineffable going on within the human mind, or you can believe we just don't understand what quality in a mind is yet, even though we might someday. Either of those opinions allows one to distinguish quantity and quality. In order to confuse quantity and quality, you have to reject both possibilities. The mere possibility of there being something ineffable about personhood is what drives many technologists to reject the notion of quality. They want to live in an airtight reality that resembles an idealized computer program, in which everything is understood and there are no fundamental mysteries. They recoil from even the hint of a potential zone of mystery or an unresolved seam in one's worldview. This desire for absolute order usually leads to tears in human affairs, so there is a historical reason to distrust it. Materialist extremists have long seemed determined to win a race with religious fanatics: Who can do the most damage to the most people?”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“My mother? My own mother told my lady governess that if the baby and I were in danger then they should save the baby.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Red Queen

“The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“One of the main arguments that I make is that although almost everyone accepts that it is morally wrong to inflict “unnecessary” suffering and death on animals, 99% of the suffering and death that we inflict on animals can be justified only by our pleasure, amusement, or convenience. For example, the best justification that we have for killing the billions of nonhumans that we eat every year is that we enjoy the taste of animal flesh and animal products. This is not an acceptable justification if we take seriously, as we purport to, that it is wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering or death on animals, and it illustrates the confused thinking that I characterize as our “moral schizophrenia” when it comes to nonhumans.

A follow-up question that I often get is: “What about vivisection? Surely that use of animals is not merely for our pleasure, is it?”

Vivisection, Part One: The “Necessity” of Vivisection | Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach”
― GaryLFrancione

“Poor little girl. Poor little girl," Nan says, and at first I think she is speaking of the baby, perhaps it is a girl after all. But then I realize she is speaking of me, a girl of thirteen years, whose own mother has said that they can let her die as long as a son and heir is born.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Red Queen

“Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations…. This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures…. It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures.”
― Christian Smith, What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up

“Be a wife of whom he can make no complaint, Margaret. That is the best advice I can give to you. You will be his wife; that is to be his servant, his possession. He will be your master. You had better please him.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Red Queen

“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!”
― Philippa Gregory, The Red Queen

“For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces- each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.”
― Miranda July, All Fours

“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.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Red Queen

“The ultimate form of dehumanization is not to reduce humans to the rank of animals, but to elevate animals to the rank of humans; the ultimate form of depersonalization is not to take away the personhood of subjects, but to give personhood to objects; and the ultimate form of demoralization is not to lower morality to the level of caprice, but to raise caprice to the level of morality.”
― Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

“After a pause the old man pointed to the sky and said: 'The infinite has being. It is there. If infinity had no self then self would not be. But it is. Therefore it has a self. The self of infinity is God.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“To believe that the expression of someone’s pain is the expression of their personhood does little more than express my ignorance about my own personhood as well as theirs.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“You can see a person's soul in the eyes, they say, but you can also see them in the hands.”
― Phil Klay, Missionaries

“He would say acting is paying homage to the visionaries who had the courage to go for it; acting is freeing the parts of oneself living secretly, ashamedly, in memory and regret; acting is living at the height of one's emotional possibilities; acting is crafting reality in the name of pretend; acting is the one time when no one suffers the consequences of truth.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“No one is who they were.
The person you were a moment ago is already gone. What you were seeing, thinking, feeling… That precise configuration of brain activity and cells… Lost forever.
Time remakes us all.”
― Charles Soule, Star Wars: Crimson Reign

“I think every girl has a thing or two, tiny details in her life that say This is me. I’m done hiding. I’m done feeling ashamed.”
― Ashley Herring Blake, Girl Made of Stars

“Do you know why he became so angry when you started asking him questions? It was not because you were defying him or challenging him. It was because you made him think, for the briefest second, about what he was doing to you. Bullies do not like that. If they are forced to remember that you are a person just like them, that means they have to consider that they are wrong, that they are cruel.”
― Matt Wallace, The Supervillain's Guide to Being a Fat Kid

“In a post-Enlightenment 'scientific' context, to challenge the axiom of human exceptionalism is to indulge in anthropomorphism, because while we might think we see manifestations of personhood in animal others, what we are really doing is attributing human characteristics to animals. This is because only humans can be persons.”
― Samantha Hurn, Humans and Other Animals: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions

“The only reprieve I need is that of my own conscience.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (Penguin Hardback Classics) by Victor Hugo Reprint Edition