"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." --Friedrich Nietzsche
"The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it." & "That's the kind of society I want to build. I want a guarantee - with physics and mathematics, not with laws - that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications." --John Gilmore
"Anything that is worth copying is worth sharing." & "The more we give away, the richer we become." --Eben Moglen
"Instead of worrying about what somebody else is going to do, which is not under your control, the important thing is, what are you going to decide about what is under your control?" --Richard Stallman
"When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place." & "A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt. The "taken for granted" is the test of sanity; "what everyone knows" is the line between us and them." & "Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn't reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator. Monopoly controls have been the exception in free societies; they have been the rule in closed societies." & "While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible. " & "Code is law" --Lawrence Lessig
"Cyberlaw is global law." --Nicholas Negroponte
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." --Jimmy Wales
"P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. Most of the books, music and movies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere in the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the Internet have managed to put just about everything online. What’s more, they’ve done it far cheaper than any other archiving/revival effort ever." --Cory Doctorow
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..." --William Gibson
"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'" --Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation
"We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before." -- John Perry Barlow
"Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing." "Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable." --John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
"What I argue is that if I'm going to be held accountable for my actions that I should be allowed to record... my actions. Especially if somebody else is keeping a record of my actions." --Steve Mann
"Which country is suffering from too much freedom of speech? Name it, is there one?" -- Julian #Assange.
"For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that—either now or in the uncertain future—patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable." -- Bruce Schneier
"We have a name for things that don't copy, they're called extinct!" -- Cory Doctorow
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” -- Isaac Newton