Quotes by Shepard Humphries from the Philosophy Book about Consent
The Consent Principle by Shepard Humphries, author of Too Complex To Command.
* “Your life belongs to you. Not to the state, not to the collective, not to a well-intentioned intellectual who can demonstrate, with impressive charts and peer-reviewed citations, that your choices are suboptimal.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “The right to make your own choices includes the right to make choices that others — including very smart others — consider mistakes.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “Whoever yells loudest wins — unless we agree, in advance, to play by the rules of reason.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “Snap judgments and tribal instincts make for excellent short-term survival tools. They make for rather poor social policy.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “The hallmark of a civilized creature is the transition from the crude reign of force to the luminous realm of consent.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “Once you have established that rights can be violated when the stakes are high enough, the only remaining question is who decides what ‘high enough’ means.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “Every suspension of rights ‘just this once’ is a precedent. Precedents become policies. Policies become systems.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “The planner may be smarter than any individual in their purview. They are not smarter than the aggregate of all of those individuals acting freely in their own interests.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “Before you tear down a fence, you should understand why it was built. You might conclude, after careful examination, that it should come down. But tearing it down without first asking the question is not bold reform — it is recklessness in disguise.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “The world changes one mind at a time, one kept promise at a time, one voluntary exchange at a time, one genuine human connection at a time.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “Consistency is not comfortable. But it is the thing that makes a philosophical framework genuinely yours rather than a sophisticated rationalization for your existing preferences.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “The most persuasive thing a person committed to voluntary principles can do is embody them visibly and well.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “The goal is not to win arguments. The goal is to invite genuine inquiry. There is a profound difference, and it shows.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “Need, however urgent, does not generate a right to someone else’s property.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “No institution can possess rights that individuals do not possess.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “If an action would be immoral for a private person, it does not become moral when performed collectively, or through a democratic process, or by an institution with an impressive official name.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “The state is a phantom — a story told so many times, by so many authoritative voices, in so many institutional contexts, that it has achieved the solidity of a fact. But it is not a fact. It is a belief.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “A right that requires the compelled labor of others is not a right. It is a claim.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “The difference between acts and omissions — between initiating force and failing to prevent harm — matters enormously. This distinction is blurred constantly in political discourse, deliberately and strategically, because blurring it makes coercion seem like compassion.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “There is a profound peace available in genuinely internalizing this: the world contains an enormous amount of behavior that is suboptimal by your standards. The question is not ‘how do I fix this?’ but ‘is this mine to fix?'” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “The voluntary world is already here, in every interaction that takes place on terms both parties genuinely accepted. It surrounds us. We are already living in it.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “The test of the principle is not whether you apply it when it is convenient. It is whether you apply it when it costs you something.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “In a world where enormously sophisticated and well-resourced institutions are continuously working to shape your perception of reality to serve their interests, a sound epistemology is not an intellectual luxury. It is a survival tool.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “True autonomy begins not with a political revolution but with a cognitive one: the decision to subject your own beliefs to the same scrutiny you would apply to a stranger’s.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
* “The beliefs most worth examining are precisely the ones that feel most unexaminable.” — Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle
philosophy quotes from the consent principle book.
