Philip K. Howard famous quotes

Coercion by government, the main fear of our founding fathers, is now its most common attribute.
-- Philip K. Howard

#Father #Government #Coercion

We've been trained to squint into a legal microscope, hoping that we can judge any dispute against the standard of a perfect society, where everyone will agree what's fair, and where accidents will be extinct, risk will be no more.
-- Philip K. Howard

#Motivation #Inspiration #Perfect

Human nature turns out to be more complicated than the idea that people will get along if only the rules are clear enough. Uncertainty, the ultimate evil that modern law seeks to eradicate, generally fosters cooperation, not the opposite.
-- Philip K. Howard

#Law #Opposites #Ideas

Rights are not the language of democracy. Compromise is what democracy is about. Rights are the language of freedom, and are absolute because their role is to protect our liberty. By using the absolute power of freedom to accomplish reforms of democracy, we have undermined democracy and diminished our freedom.
-- Philip K. Howard

#Rights #Liberty #Democracy

We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.
-- Philip K. Howard

#Thinking #Law #America

Roxy Sorkin, your father just won the Academy Award. I'm going to have to insist on some respect from your guinea pig.

I wanted to live. For the father and brother who I never knew and for my mother who was cheated of a life of happiness. I wanted to live for them. And I wanted to live for me.

You can't accuse the creator of The Boondocks, ... Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan was the devil and the government is lying about 9/11.

The whole history of Israel, its ritual and its government, is explicable only as it is typical of the spiritual Israel, of the sacrifice on Calvary, of the precious blood which alone can wash away sin.

Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they're here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.

To be effective, morality has to be reasoned (or worked out). To want ("vouloir", Fr.) to repress evil only by coercion, and to obtain morality by a sort of training with the help of constraint, without motivating it from within, is to make it an unnatural result, devoided of lastind value.

Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.

Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.

To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it.

Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.