Daily Inspiration Quote by Hans Kung

“Infinite” is a deliberately destabilizing word here: it yanks human worth out of the marketplace of utility, productivity, purity, or national belonging. Hans Kung, writing as a Catholic theologian who spent much of his career in principled friction with institutional authority, uses moral absolute language to stake out a boundary line. If a person is “infinitely precious,” then no calculus of “the greater good” gets to quietly shave off the inconvenient lives at the margins.

The pairing of “infinitely precious” with “unconditionally protected” is where the intent sharpens. Preciousness is sentimental until it becomes policy; protection is the demand that sentiment cash out as restraint and care. Kung isn’t offering a soft humanism. He’s issuing a hard constraint against conditional compassion: the kind that applies to the deserving, the familiar, the legally documented, the ideologically compliant. The subtext is a critique of modern systems that treat people as means - whether in war, in bioethics, in prisons, in migration regimes, or in economies that quietly rank lives by “value.”

Context matters: Kung was a leading voice behind a “global ethic,” trying to articulate a moral floor shared across religions and secular worldviews after the twentieth century’s mass atrocities. In that light, the line reads like a post-Holocaust, post-totalitarian antidote: never again should institutions be allowed to redefine “person” downward. It’s also a veiled challenge to the Church itself, whose moral certainty can sometimes drift into moral triage. Kung’s sentence is small, but it’s meant to be non-negotiable.