Internet activists

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

"How many of you have broken no laws this month?"

"If you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody."

"When the X500 revolution comes, your name will be lined against the wall and shot."

"My time coming, any day, don't worry about me, no Been so long I felt this way, I'm in no hurry, no. Rainbows end down that highway where ocean breezes blow My time coming, voices saying, they tell me where to go. Don't worry 'bout me, no no, don't worry 'bout me, no And I'm in no hurry, no no no, I know where to go. California, preaching on the burning shore California, I'll be knocking on the golden door Like an angel, standing in a shaft of light Rising up to paradise, I know I'm going to shine."

"Everyone seems to be playing well within the boundaries of his usual rule set. I have yet to hear anyone say something that seemed likely to mitigate the idiocy of this age."

"Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions. Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate that expands with development. Imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where business you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs..."

"The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops."

"I support freedom of expression, no matter whose, so I oppose DDoS attacks regardless of their target... they're the poison gas of cyberspace."

"It didn't matter what we did or where we did it as long as we were together. We knew we'd found what most people either pursue in years of futile search or dismiss as a fantasy at the outset: the missing half of ourselves. The real thing."

"I don't know that I believe in the supernatural, but I do believe in miracles, and our time together was filled with the events of magical unlikelihood. I also believe that angels, or something like them, sometimes live among us, hidden within our fellow human beings. I'm convinced that such an angel dwelled in Cynthia. I felt this presence often in Cynthia's lightness of being, in her decency, her tolerance, her incredible love. I never heard Cynthia speak ill of anyone nor did I ever hear anyone speak ill of her. She gave joy and solace to all who met her."

"With a care both conscious and reverential, Cynthia and I built a love which I believe inspired most who came near it. We felt it was our gift to the world. We wanted to show the hesitant the miracle that comes when two people give their hearts unconditionally, honestly, fearlessly, and without reservation or judgement. We wanted to make our union into a message of hope, and I believe we did, even though we knew that hearts opened so freely can be shattered if something should go wrong. As my heart is shattered now."

"Among the waves of tragedy which have crashed on me with her death is a terror that our message of hope has been changed into a dreadful warning. But I must tell you that had I known in the beginning that I would be here today doing this terrible thing, I would still have loved her as unhesitatingly, because true love is worth any price one is asked to pay. The other message we wished to convey was one of faith in the essential goodness and purpose of life. I have always felt that no matter how inscrutable its ways and means, the universe is working perfectly and working according to a greater plan than we can know."

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders."

"You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here."

"Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish. These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. 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."

"Copyright and intellectual property are the most important issues now. If you don't have something that assures fair use, then you don't have a free society. If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass."

"You now have two distinct ways of gathering information beyond what you yourself can experience. One of them is less a medium than an environment — the Internet — with a huge multiplicity of points of view, lots of different ways to find out what's going on in the world. Lots of people are tuned to that, and a million points of view have bloomed. It creates a cacophony of viewpoints that doesn't have any political coherence at all, a beautiful melee, but it doesn't have the capacity to create large blocs of belief. The other medium, TV, has a much smaller share of viewers than at any time in the past, but those viewers get all their information there. They get turned into a very uniform belief block. TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob."

"It’s a perfect set of circumstances to give us the time Yeats foretold, with the best having lost all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity. I’m an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I’m not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government."

"I'm a free-marketeer. I believe in free markets, but... sometimes you have things that look like free markets but aren't because of artificial reasons. I'm not very happy with the current state of what calls itself free market economy in the world because you've got all these grotesque monopolies that are able to game the system in a way that's to their advantage by virtue of their power, and that's not a free market. A real free market has some kind of countervailing influence from the government to keep a monopoly in check, but this government... it's not about free marketing principles, it's about greed pure and simple. And this government wants to assure that the other people that they went to college with get just as rich as they do. This country is going to make Mexico look like Sweden inside of ten years in terms of wealth distribution, because there are no countervailing forces. They've eliminated tax basically for the ultra-rich, they've eliminated any control over monopolies, the greedy have free reign and its just going to be the super rich and the peasants."

"I was always raised to think that Republicans were about limited government, about individual liberty, about fiscal responsibility, about balanced budgets, about a wariness of military adventures abroad, about responsible encouragement to business. There's a whole list of things I thought the Republican Party was all about, and these guys that presently occupy the White House, are categorically against every single one of those things. So if they're Republicans, I'm not. But I'm really not a very comfortable Democrat. I mean the Democrats in the last elections proved themselves to be a bunch of dithering pussies... and it was pathetic. So I'm just waiting until one party or the other actually gets a moral compass and a backbone."

"I wasn't tempted to vote for Bush, but I understand why people did… because he obviously had integrity. It was a terrible kind of integrity, but he does what he says and he means what he says. And what he says is terrible and what he does is terrible, but he's consistent. So I think a lot of people in Wyoming who care so much about integrity that they're willing to choose somebody that has a monstrous willingness to do any damn thing as long as he's up front about it — but that's not really quite enough for me. I mean I look forward to the day when I can be Republican again. I'm an Alan Simpson Republican."

"Polyamory — that's where you're freely confessed that you have more than one lover at a time. And actually I'm less that way than I used to be, but I was trying to make people understand, that at least for some folks, this was a fairly natural state. And instead of skulking around about it that we'd all do better to avoid the deceit and be honest."

"The world lost a true hero today, a Renaissance man who was a relentless warrior for our freedom."

"It is no exaggeration to say that major parts of the Internet we all know and love today exist and thrive because of Barlow’s vision and leadership. He always saw the Internet as a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced can find an audience and people can connect with others regardless of physical distance. Barlow was sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-utopianism that believed that the Internet could solve all of humanity's problems without causing any more. As someone who spent the past 27 years working with him at EFF, I can say that nothing could be further from the truth. Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good. He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter: "I knew it’s also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it. So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls 'turn-key totalitarianism'.”"

"“Estimated Prophet,” words by John Barlow, music by Bob Weir, has always worked a special kind of magic. Barlow captures that whole slightly (or very) deranged or tripped-out Deadhead vibe so well, but the song’s character transcends that little box over time — both over the time the particular rendition might take, and over the time from when we may have first heard it played or performed to the most recent rendition we have heard. That character stands there in my mind’s eye, calling down the thunder, and he seems so sure, so devoted to his vision, that he stands for everyone who was ever caught up in a transforming belief, who gave in to delusions of grandeur, who believed himself the center of the universe — but wait — haven’t we all done that, at least to some degree? It’s human nature to consider oneself the center of the universe. … Barlow calls on plenty of biblical imagery for the lyrics, with the sea parting before the singer, and fire wheels burning in the air, etc. Pretty much your average run-of-the-mill vision for an experienced Deadhead. The interesting thing, for me, is the notion that this character is a prophet. And therein lies a more subtle biblical reference, not at all overt, but hovering in the back of our minds, perhaps, if we have any biblical training. Namely, the notion, expressed by Jesus in three of the four gospels, and therefore likely to be something he really did say, that a prophet has no honor in his own country. … This is one of those songs, and there are quite a number of them in the Dead’s repertoire, in which a not-entirely-sympathetic character is brought to life, and, in the course of being brought to life, is made more sympathetic."

"This life is fleeting, as we all know — the Muse we serve is not. John had a way of taking life’s most difficult things and framing them as challenges, therefore adventures. He was to be admired for that, even emulated. He’ll live on in the songs we wrote..."

"The great moral question of the twenty-first century is this: if all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?"

"We are a non-utopian political movement. We are not interested in going nowhere. We are not interested in going to some place we have never been, which we will get to after the revolution because people will be different. The crucial operating premise of the Free Software Movement as a revolutionary politic is: Proof of Concept plus Running code. Here. We did it already. It's sort of working. If you take a copy and help us fix it, it could really be something. Here. You want it? Take it. We like it. It's Free."

"I think Larry is right to notice that the contradictions are catching the allies up already. It's one of those cases where even before you begin bombing the children, the coalition is falling apart. And that's good news. And I'm very much in favor of it. Some Powell or other is messing up the war."

"The Entertainment Industry on Planet Earth had decided that in order to acquire Layer 7 Data Security, it was necessary to lock up layers 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 so that no technological progress could occur without their permission. This was known by the IT Industry and the Consumer Electronics Industry on the planet to be offensive nonsense, but there was no counterweight to it, and there was no organised consumer dissent sufficient to require them to stand up for technical merit and their own right to run their own businesses without dictation from companies a tenth their size. Not surprisingly, since it is part of the role we play in this political power concentrated in poverty, humility, and sanctity, we brought them to a consensus they were unable to bring themselves to - which is represented in the license by a rule which fundamentally says "If you want to experiment with locking down layer below 7 in the pursuit of data networks inside businesses that keep the business's data at home, you may do so freely, we have no objection - not only do we have no objection to you doing it, we've no objection to your using our parts to do it with. But when you use our parts to build machines which control peoples' daily lives - which provide them with education and culture, build devices which are modifiable by them to the same extent that they're modifiable by you. That's all we want. If you can modify the device after you give it to them, then they must be able to modify the device after you give it to them - that's a price for using our parts. That's a deal which has been accepted."

"You could make a good case that the history of social life is about the history of the technology of memory. That social order and control, structure of governance, social cohesion in states or organizations larger than face-to- face society depends on the nature of the technology of memory--both how it works and what it remembers... In short, what societies value is what they memorize, and how they memorize it, and who has access to its memorized form determines the structure of power that the society represents and acts from."

"The difference is, this time, we win."

"Yesterday, on the 17th of May, we Norwegians celebrated our constitution day to mark the signing of Norway's constitution in 1814. Maybe it is because we are a small country: In Norway this is an important day. All over Norway children have paraded in their best clothes to the music of thousands of marching bands, and countless speeches have been made to remind each others, as fellow Norwegians, that freedom should never be taken for granted."

"Putting the power back in the hands of the people."

"The world is lucky we're so nice."

"It's ironic that India has weapons capable of destroying the world, but they can't secure a little web server which is connected to their networks."

"If you're gonna amass data which can take many lives ... at least secure it."

"The year is 1998. We should be moving towards world peace in the millennium, and nuclear warfare [and] testing is NO way forward. It can destroy the world. I'm only young; I don't want a hostile world on the edge of a nuclear conflict."

"In the near future, the web is going to be the master copy of human knowledge. We need to figure out ways to use that knowledge."

"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice. If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find. If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whos hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes. The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them."

"We all only live once. So we are obligated to make good use of the time that we have and to do something that is meaningful and satisfying. This is something that I find meaningful and satisfying. That is my temperament. I enjoy creating systems on a grand scale, and I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards."

"You can’t publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results, that should be the standard in journalism. You can’t do it in newspapers because there isn’t enough space, but now with the internet there is."

"Large newspapers are routinely censored by legal costs. It is time this stopped. It is time a country said, enough is enough, justice must be seen, history must be preserved, and we will give shelter from the storm."

"That’s arguably what spy agencies do — high-tech investigative journalism. It’s time that the media upgraded its capabilities along those lines."

"Seeing ongoing political reforms that have a real impact on people all over the world is extremely satisfying. But we want every person who's having a dispute with their kindergarten to feel confident about sending us material."

"It is impossible to correct abuses unless we know that they’re going on."

"The sense of perspective that interaction with multiple cultures gives you I find to be extremely valuable, because it allows you to see the structure of a country with greater clarity, and gives you a sense of mental independence. You're not swept up in the trivialities of a nation. You can concentrate on the serious matters."

"It is the media that controls the boundaries of what is politically permissible, so better to change the media. Profit motives work against it, but if we can have the audience understand that most other forms of journalism are not credible, then it may be a forced move."

"The final nail in the coffin was that I went to the hundredth anniversary of physics at the ANU. There were some 1500 visitors there - four Nobel prize winners - and every goddamn one of them was carting around, on their backs, a backpack given to them by the Defence Science Technology Organisation. At least it was an Australian defence science organisation. And there was just something about their attire, and the way they moved their bodies, and of course the bags on their backs didn't help much either. I couldn't respect them as men."

"WikiLeaks will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than WikiLeaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, former African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon."

"Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture them."

"You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion."

"We are not about to leave the field of doing good simply because harm might happen … In our four-year publishing history no one has ever come to physical harm that we are aware of or that anyone has alleged. On the other hand, we have changed governments and constitutions and had tremendous positive outcomes...We wanted to make the news, not be the news. But that produced extraordinary curiosity as to who we were ... this attempt not to be the news, made us the news... We are creating a space behind us that permits a form of journalism which lives up to the name that journalism has always tried to establish for itself. We are creating that space because we are taking on the criticism that comes from robust exposure of powerful groups... We do not have national security concerns. We have concerns about human beings.. We have had over 100 legal attacks. We have been victorious in almost every single legal attack... we operate within the rule of law."

"The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free."

"Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism."

"All memoir is prostitution."

"I would be happy to accept asylum, political asylum, in India — a nation I love. In return, I will bring Mayawati a range of the finest British footwear."

"The goal is justice, the method is transparency. It's important not to confuse the goal and the method."

"Citizens have a right and a duty to scrutinise the state."

"I may be a chauvinist pig of some sort, but I'm no rapist."

"Vanity in a newspaper man is like perfume on a whore; they use it to fend off a dark whiff of themselves."

"I never had a mentor. I was forced to make myself up as I went along."

"Once a media group is powerful for long enough it starts to enter into a relationship with other powerful groups, that is very natural, because other powerful groups seek its favour, seek to make deals and agreements with it, and the individuals who run it. And it starts to stop seeing itself as a group that holds powerful groups to account and starts seeing itself as part of the social network of the elite."

"If it was the case that WikiLeaks grew to be a very large and powerful media group and remained there for a long time, of course we would enter into the same elite power relationships and would become corrupted by it."

"I've never said that secrecy doesn't have its place, in fact it's a cornerstone of WikiLeaks, is secrecy. It is protecting the identity of our sources, so it's a cornerstone of our operations. Privacy or secrecy gives organisations an edge over actors who are hostile to them, so it is important for small organisations that are acting in the public's-, public interest to have secrecy. Equally it is important that large and powerful organisations never believe that they have absolute secrecy. It's not important that everything be revealed instantly from them, but it is important that they never feel secure that any particular piece of information will never be revealed. Because it is that fear that some plan will be revealed that keeps them accountable to the degree that they are accountable at all."

"There is a view that one should never be permitted to be criticized for being even possibly in the future engaged in a contributory act that might be immoral, and that that type of arse-covering is more important than actually saving people's lives. That it is better to let a thousand people die than risk going to save them and possibly running over someone on the way. And that is something that I find to be philosophically repugnant."

"This is not justice; never could this be justice, the verdict was ordained long ago. Its function is not to determine questions such as guilt or innocence, or truth or falsehood. It is a public relations exercise, designed to provide the government with an alibi for posterity. It is a show of wasteful vengeance; a theatrical warning to people of conscience."

"In my experience it is more reliable and fairer to look at peoples interests and expenditure rather than try to diagnose their inner mental state, as the latter often lets people project their own biases."

"Our No. 1 enemy is ignorance. And I believe that is the No. 1 enemy for everyone — it's not understanding what actually is going on in the world."

"Censorship represents Fear by Big Information. 'Stopping leaks' is a new form of censorship."

"In a spectacular electronic intrusion and information dump, sympathetic backers operating under the Anonymous banner had exposed a $2-million-a-month subversion campaign targeting Wikileaks and its supporters (including Glenn Greenwald), which had been prepared by a group of private security contractors on behalf of Bank of America. (p.11)"

"At this point, the delegation was one part Google, three parts US foreign-policy establishment, but I was still none the wiser. (p. 17)"

"It was at this point that I realized Eric Schmidt might not have been an emissary of Google alone. Whether officially or not, he had been keeping some company that placed him very close to Washington, DC, including a well-documented relationship with President Obama. Not only had Hillary Clinton's people known that Eric Schmidt's partner had visited me, but they had also elected to use her as a back channel. (pp. 20-21)"

"The received wisdom in advanced capitalistic societies is that there still exists an organic "civil society sector" in which institutions form autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this sector are respected by actors from government and the "private sector," leaving a safe space for NGOs and nonprofits to advocate for things like human rights, free speech, and accountable government."

"This sounds like a great idea. But if it was ever true, it has not been for decades. Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming "civil society" into a buyer's market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm's length. The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy. (p. 25)"

"Schmidt's emergence as Google's "foreign minister"--making pomp and ceremony state visits across geopolitical fault lines--had not come out of nowhere; it had been presaged by years of assimilation within US establishment networks of reputation and influence. (pp. 34-35)"

"By all appearances, Google's bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgement of the "benevolent superpower," They will tell you that open-mindedness is a virtue, but all perspectives that challenge the exceptionalist drive at the heart of American foreign policy will remain invisible to them. This is the impenetrable banality of "don't be evil," They believe that they are doing good. And that is a problem. (p. 35)"

"Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has. Schmidt's tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of US power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation. (p. 37)"

"The Department of Homeland Security defines the Defense Industrial Base as "the worldwide industrial complex that enables research and development, as well as design, production, delivery and maintenance of military weapons systems, subsystems, and components or parts, [emphasis added]. The Defense Industrial Base provides "products and services that are essential to mobilize, deploy, and sustain military operations." Does it include regular commercial services purchased by the US military? No. The definition specifically excludes the purchase of regular commercial services. Whatever makes Google a "key member of the Defense Industrial Base," it is not recruitment campaigns pushed out through Google AdWords or soldiers checking their Gmail. (p. 41)"

"Whether it is being just a company or "more than just a company," Google's geopolitical aspirations are firmly enmeshed within the foreign-policy agenda of the world's largest superpower. (p. 46)"

"Let me first frame this. I looked at something that I had seen going on in the world, which is that I thought there were too many unjust acts. And I wanted there to be more just acts, and fewer unjust acts. (pp. 66-67)"

"[Y]ou can affect a lot of people with a small amount of information. Therefore, you can change the behavior of many people with a small amount of information. The question then arises as to what kinds of information will produce behavior which is just and disincentivize behavior which is unjust. (p. 67)"

"It was clear to me that all over the world publishing is a problem. Whether than it through self-censorship or overt censorship. (p. 69)"

"The issue of preserving politically salient intellectual content while it is under attack is central to what Wikileaks does, because that's what we're after. We're after those bits that people are trying to suppress because we suspect, usually rightly, that they're expending economic work on suppressing those bits because they perceive that those bits are going to induce some change. (p. 83)"

"[I]t's a very suggestive signal that the people who know the information best--i.e., the people who wrote it--are expending economic work in preventing it going into the historical record, preventing it getting to the public. Why spend so much work doing that? It's more efficient to just let everyone have it--you don't have to spend time guarding it, but also you are more efficient in terms of your organization because of all the positive unintended consequences of the information going around. So we selectively go after that information, and that information is selectively suppressed inside organizations, and very frequently, if it is a powerful group, as soon as someone tries to publish it, we see attempts at post-publication suppression. (p. 84)"

"I think that the instincts human beings have are actually much better than the societies that we have. (p. 118)"

"You can have a lot of political "change" in the United States, but will it really change that much? Will it change the amount of money in someone's bank account? Will it change contracts? Will it void contracts that already exist? And contracts on contracts? And contracts on contracts on contracts? Not really. So I say that free speech in many Western places is free not as a result of liberal circumstances but rather as a result of such intense fiscalization that it doesn't matter what you say. The dominant elite doesn't have to be scared of what people think, because a change in political view is not going to change whether they own their company or not; it is not going to change whether they own a piece of land or not. But China is still a politicized society, although it is rapidly heading towards a fiscalized society. (p. 120)"

"I often say that censorship is always a cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care what people think. (p. 121)"

"The much bigger thing is that we as human beings shepherd and create our intellectual history as a civilization. And it is that intellectual history on the shelf that we can pull off the shelf to do stuff, and to avoid doing the dumb things again, because somebody already did the dumb thing and wrote about their experience and we don't need to do it again. There are several processes that are creating that record, and other processes where people are trying to destroy bits of that record, and others that are trying to prevent people from putting things into that record in the first place. We all live off that intellectual record. So what we want to do is get as much into the record, prevent as much as possible being deleted from the record, and then make the record as searchable as possible. (p. 124)"

"A journalist for the "Nation," Greg Mitchell, who has also written about us, wrote a book about the mainstream media called "So Wrong for So Long." And that title is basically it. Yes we have these heroic moments with Watergate and so on, but actually, come on, the press has never been very good. It has always been very bad. Fine journalists are an exception to the rule. When you are involved in something yourself, like I am with Wikileaks, and you know every facet of it, you look to see what is reported about it in the mainstream press and you see naked lie after naked lie. You know that the journalist knows it's a lie, it is not a simple mistake. Then people repeat lies and so on. The condition of the mainstream press nowadays is so appalling I don't think it can be reformed. I don't think that is possible. I think it has to be eliminated, and replaced with something better. (pp. 125-126)"

"I have been pushing this idea of scientific journalism--that things must be precisely cited with the original source, and as much of the information as possible should be put in the public domain so that people can look at it, just like in science so that you can test to see whether the conclusion follows from the experimental data. Otherwise the journalist probably just made it up. In fact, that is what happens all the time: people just make it up. They make it up to such a degree that we are led to war. Most wars in the twentieth century started as a result of lies amplified and spread by the mainstream press. And you may say, "Well that is a horrible circumstance; it is terrible that all these wars start with lies." And I say no, this is a tremendous opportunity, because it means that populations basically don't like wars and they have to be lied into it. That means we can be "truthed" into peace. That is cause for great hope. (pp. 126-127)"

"It's not possible to win this kind of thing. This is a continuous striving that people have been doing for a long time. Of course, there are many individual battles that we win, but it is the nature of human beings that they lie and deceive. Organized groups of people who do not lie and deceive find each other and get together. Because they have that temperament, they are more efficient, because they are not lying and cheating and deceiving each other. That is a very old struggle between opportunists and collaborators. I don't see that going away. I think we can make some significant advances and perhaps it is the making of these advances and being involved in that struggle that is good for people. The process is part of the end game. It's not just to get somewhere in the end; rather, this process of people feeling that it is worthwhile to be involved in that sort of struggle, is in fact worthwhile for people. (pp.190)"

"Power is mostly the illusion of power. The Pentagon demanded we destroy our publications. We kept publishing. Clinton denounced us and said we were an attack on the entire "international community". We kept publishing. I was put in prison and under house arrest. We kept publishing. We went head to head with the NSA getting Edward Snowden out of Hong Kong, we won and got him asylum. Clinton tried to destroy us and was herself destroyed. Elephants, it seems, can be brought down with string. Perhaps there are no elephants."

"most power structures are deeply incompetent, staffed by people who don't really believe in their institutions and that most power is the projection of the perception of power. And the more secretively it works, the more incompetent it is, because secrecy breeds incompetence, while openness breeds competence, because one can see and can compare actions and see which one is more competent. To keep up these appearances, institutional heads or political heads such as presidents spend most of the time trying to walk in front of the train and pretending that it is following them, but the direction is set by the tracks and by the engine of the train. Understanding that means that small and committed organisations can outmanoeuvre these institutional dinosaurs, like the State Department, the NSA or the CIA."

"What are you frightened of in relation to me meeting with a journalist? What is the embassy afraid of?...Is this a prison?.. why are you surveilling me speaking to a US journalist? Do you think it’s unreasonable for me to expect privacy when I meet with a journalist? Why are you silent?...Why can’t you say anything? Don’t you have an excuse? What is the basis? Why are you surveilling an American journalist? What reason should we tell her?... Is this a prison? This is how you treat a prisoner, not a political refugee!... I am trying to have a private conversation with a journalist. I am also a journalist — and you’re stopping me from doing my work. How can I safely relay my mistreatment and the illegality going on here to this journalist while under surveillance?...You are preventing this journalist from meeting with me in any other room...You have been illegally surveilling me... I know you want me to shut up — the Ecuadorian president has already gagged me... I am banned from producing journalism... You are acting as an agent of the United States government and preventing me from speaking with a US journalist about these violations... What kind of sovereign state allows its ambassadors to be interrogated by another nation? No self respecting state does that!..."

"If wars can be started with lies, they can be stopped by truth."

"[Mr Assange's application did not raise] an arguable point of law"

"Pope Francis never stopped championing peace, compassion, and justice. A true ally in the fight for Julian Assange’s freedom. May he rest in peace."

"[His friendship with Pamela Anderson] It was Westwood who introduced her to Julian Assange. Her visits to the Ecuadorian embassy, wearing cocktail dresses and carrying vegan rescue parcels, became infamous. No one knew quite how to read their relationship. She said she loved him – "I still do. He’s so funny. Kind of like nerdy funny. He repeats a joke two or three times – we get it, Julian." In the book she calls him "sexy" and says that once, after sharing a bottle of mezcal, "we passed out, and I woke at four in the morning with his cat on my chest. We’d fallen asleep following a slightly frisky, fun, alcohol-induced night." When I ask about it, she teases: "We were close, but I didn’t say it wasn’t platonic." He asked her to marry him. "He was joking. He goes: 'We should get married on the steps of the embassy. I wonder if they’d arrest me?' Then, 'But why give up one prison for another?'" She lets out a high laugh. (Four years later, Assange married his lawyer Stella Moris.)"

"Assange’s WikiLeaks revelations, redactions notwithstanding, gave proof, yet again, that the government of the United States engages in war crimes of historic proportions on a daily basis around the world..... Recent documents made available by the CIA’s own official witnesses against Assange not only reveal the frame-up nature of his case, but the lengths the imperial beast considered to rid itself of a single individual, including Assange’s contemplated assassination by the CIA. Assange’s handful of name redactions – no doubt naively employed by WikiLeaks to protect itself from government persecution by citing supposedly inviolable free press and free speech precedents – proved useless in the face of the government’s unleashing its might against a singe individual. That might included plans to send CIA disruption spies into WikiLeaks, illegally breaking into the London-based Ecuadoran Embassy to kidnap him, organizing military forces to orchestrate his kidnapping, including London street battles with imagined Russian forces protecting Assange, to major battles at the London Airport to prevent hypothetical Russian aircraft from absconding with Assange. Fantasy? Absolutely Not! All this, including Assange’s possible assassination, were on the table as U.S. imperialism considered its options in dealing with a single rogue journalist, indeed an Australian journalist over whom the U.S. had zero jurisdiction!"

"It’s pretty sad when the communists are condemning and criticizing the U.S. government for hypocrisy when it comes to human-rights abuses and civil liberties. It’s even sadder when they are right, especially in the case of Julian Assange."

"In a patently political decision, the U.K. High Court reversed the British lower court’s denial of extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States on a narrow ground, despite the recent revelations of a CIA plot to kidnap and assassinate him... Assange was charged by the Trump administration with violation of the Espionage Act for revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. He could be sentenced to 175 years in prison if he is tried and convicted in the United States. But instead of dismissing Trump’s indictment, the Biden administration continues to pursue the case against Assange, notwithstanding the grave threats his prosecution poses to investigative and national security journalism."

"Two days before the High Court ruling,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared at the so-called Summit for Democracy, “Media freedom plays an indispensable role in informing the public, holding governments accountable, and telling stories that otherwise would not be told. The U.S. will continue to stand up for the brave and necessary work of journalists around the world.” If Assange is tried, convicted and imprisoned for doing what journalists routinely do, it will send a chilling message to journalists that they publish material critical of the U.S. government at their peril. But by vigorously pursuing Assange’s extradition, the U.S. is doing precisely the opposite. The prosecution of Assange is the first time a journalist has been indicted under the Espionage Act for publishing truthful information."

"Julian exposed another set of wars. Basically, he exposed the so-called war on terror, which began after 9/11, has lasted 20 years, has led to six wars, millions killed, trillions wasted. That is the only balance sheet of that war. ... And if they think that punishing him in this vindictive and punitive way is going to change people’s attitudes to coming out and telling the truth, they’re wrong Julian... should never have been kept in prison for bail. He should not be in prison now awaiting a trial for extradition. He should be released. And I hope that acts like the Belmarsh Tribunal will help to bring that nearer."

"Julian Assange has paid a very, very, very high price for his lifelong determination to expose the truth. Why? Is it because he has some idea that he can make himself famous by exposing the truth? Or is it something much stronger and much more moral than that, the belief that by exposing the truth, you can save lives, you can stop wars, and you can make sure that democracies function properly by holding all public officials, elected or unelected, to public account?"

"Julian Assange... has been charged as a political criminal — something that I understand quite well, but he has been charged as the purest sort of political criminal, for having committed the transgression of choosing the wrong side.... The charges, which are — they are absolutely an unadorned legal fiction. We are told to believe that the state has these powers over what can be said and what can’t be said..."

"A young man in Australia, a long, long time ago, well before we ever knew about WikiLeaks, had an idea: the idea of using Big Brother’s technology to create a large digital kind of mirror to turn to the face of Big Brother so as to enable us to be able to watch him watching us — a bit like turning the mirror to the face of the Medusa. WikiLeaks is based on that idea."

"He has consistently and continuously dared to speak the unspeakable, in the face of opposition, in the face of power. And that is a remarkable and rare thing. That is the reason that Julian Assange sits in prison today... if you do care, as I think you do, you are a criminal of the same category as Julian Assange. In the eyes of the state, what differentiates you, what divides you from him, that is only the degree. We share the same guilt. Each of us share in the crime. And we are unindicted co-conspirators in his quest to raise a lantern in the halls of power."

"As mainstream news outlets become increasingly complacent, and even supportive of pro-war policies, it becomes more essential that anti-war voices, and anti-war journalists in particular, resist the attempt by the United States to set the precedent that the act of publishing war crimes is a punishable offense. In contrast to publications that take... a careless or outright supportive stance on the irreparable harm of U.S. foreign policy are WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Following his view that “if wars can be started with lies, they can be stopped by truth,” Assange has published some of the most vital information on U.S. foreign policy of the 21st century with perfect accuracy. Some of the information provided to the public (thanks to the anonymous online source submission system developed by Assange) includes the CIA rendition program, detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay, and U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and more. It is this view on publishing which understands war as something to be exposed and resisted that has made Assange such a hated figure by warmongers in the United States.... Despite the many problems with the mainstream press, journalism as an institution remains one of the most effective methods of resisting, and at times, ending wars. Even those distrustful of the press should be willing to oppose attacks on the right to a free press when such attacks occur. It is the guarantee of press freedom that enables anti-war reporting to make its way into the mainstream at times, shifting people's understanding of what their government does."

"In contrast to publications that take such a careless or outright supportive stance on the irreparable harm of U.S. foreign policy are WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Following his view that "if wars can be started with lies, they can be stopped by truth," Assange has published some of the most vital information on U.S. foreign policy of the 21st century with perfect accuracy. Some of the information provided to the public (thanks to the anonymous online source submission system developed by Assange) includes the CIA rendition program, detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay, and U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and more. It is this view on publishing which understands war as something to be exposed and resisted that has made Assange such a hated figure by warmongers in the United States. However, as every Assange supporter knows, a potential extradition of Assange will not just stop with Assange. The... torture he has endured and a possible extradition and even sentencing under the Espionage Act would enable the U.S. government to do the same to anyone else who exposes the crimes of the U.S. military. Even if the United States cannot successfully imprison every journalist who exposes its crimes, such a precedent would likely scare publications into even greater submission to the state. The desired outcome is the complete neutering of anti-war journalism."

"The press still has the power to challenge and prevent U.S. wars. However, this power hangs in the balance in the form of Julian Assange's fate. Recent coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal shows the potential for two types of press. One which sees its role as the mouthpiece for the most war-hungry members of a global empire or one that shows the true nature of war to the public, enabling them to oppose it and giving its victims some justice. For anti-war advocates who would rather see the latter option covering foreign policy, it is essential to show strong support for Julian Assange and demand the charges against him be dropped immediately."

"A Society that prohibits the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice... the battle for Julian's liberty has always been much more than the persecution of a publisher. It is the most important battle for press freedom of our era. And if we lose this battle, it will be devastating, not only for Julian and his family, but for us...I was in the London courtroom when Julian was being tried by Judge Vanessa Baraitser, an updated version of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland demanding the sentence before pronouncing the verdict. It was judicial farce. There was no legal basis to hold Julian in prison. There was no legal basis to try him, an Australian citizen, under the U.S. Espionage Act. The CIA spied on Julian in the embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide embassy security. This spying included recording the privileged conversations between Julian and his lawyers as they discussed his defense. This fact alone invalidated the trial. Julian is being held in a high security prison so the state can, as Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture, has testified, continue the degrading abuse and torture it hopes will lead to his psychological if not physical disintegration."

"What do Biden and Trump have in common? (Aside from jerking Iran around over the nuclear treaty, proclaiming support for a phony, unelected pretender to the Venezuelan presidency, Juan Guaido, and posturing aggressively toward China?) Both Biden and Trump support the utterly baseless Espionage Act case against journalist and publisher Julian Assange. Make no mistake, this case is a frontal assault on the first amendment. It is also one of the worst attacks on a free press in centuries. But that hasn’t stopped Trump and Biden. With a pusillanimous press quiescent about Assange and unless Biden reverses course, these two presidents will have trashed the ability of journalists to report on military and government abuses. A sword of Damocles hangs over reporters’ heads: reveal leaked material about the U.S. government and you could get slapped into prison, probably in solitary, for 175 years. Trump, now Biden, put that sword there... Surprising everyone, the very biased, anti-Assange British judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled on January 4 against the U.S. government’s extradition request. This was a rare win for Assange. The U.S. had until February 12 to appeal. Everyone waited with baited breath: would Biden’s justice department drop the case? On February 9 we got the answer – no. The U.S. will continue to try to extradite Assange."

"The New York Times reported that Assange’s lawyers contend that the U.S. is prosecuting him for political reasons. That is correct. Assange very publicly shamed the U.S. government. And the U.S. government does not stand for humiliation. (Just witness its treatment of Iran for over 40 years because of the hostage crisis.) For that, Assange has been hounded, falsely accused, tortured, prosecuted and threatened with 175 years in prison. The same fate awaited whistleblower Edward Snowden, had he not had the sense to flee to a place the U.S. could not follow, namely Russia.... Had Assange died in Belmarsh prison, or should he, that would be fine with the United States, because there’s one thing the U.S. military and national security state will not tolerate and that is publication of their crimes abroad, in other words, the truth. If he continues to pursue this appalling and unjust case against Assange, Biden will badly tarnish his fledgling administration. He will thus endorse injustice, brutality and lies. And it makes his administration’s talk about freedom of speech and freedom of the media, as something it wants to “project” with regard to countries like China, nothing more than worthless words and hypocrisy."

"In a stunning decision, a British judge has blocked the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States, saying he would not be safe in a U.S. prison due to his deteriorated mental state. In 2019, Assange was indicted in the United States on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act related to the publication of classified documents exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The United States has already announced plans to appeal the ruling. Press freedom advocates have campaigned against Assange’s prosecution for years, arguing it would set a dangerous precedent for prosecuting journalists. The blocked extradition due to concern over prison safety rather than press freedom shows that “this is not the end of the road,” says Assange legal adviser Jennifer Robinson. “This is still a terrible precedent.”"

"I do think that the decision is important and surprising, a very significant victory for Julian Assange... the press freedom implications are more complicated. The judge — while ultimately holding that Assange can’t be extradited to the United States on the basis of his mental health and the conditions under which he would be held if he were extradited here, the judge largely endorses the U.S. prosecution theory. And that theory is based on an indictment that sweeps very, very broadly, that basically the indictment is an effort to hold Assange criminally responsible for acts that journalists engage in all the time. And it doesn’t matter whether Assange himself is properly characterized as a journalist. That may be an important debate, but legally it’s completely irrelevant. The important fact is that Assange has been indicted on the grounds that he engaged in activities like cultivating confidential sources, maintaining their confidentiality or maintaining the confidentiality of their identities, and publishing classified secrets. And, of course, those things, all of those things, are integral to national security journalism."

"And the press freedom fear here is that the prosecution of Assange, and even the indictment itself, will deter journalism that is important and necessary and that should be regarded as protected by the First Amendment. And I think that this ruling is, again, a victory for Assange, but insofar as it’s an endorsement of the U.S.’s prosecution theory and of the underlying indictment, I think that that indictment is going to continue to cast a kind of shadow over investigative journalism."

"Julian #Assange is in solitary, denied visitors. He ordered a radio from the prison catalogue six months ago. A friend also ordered him a radio and the authorities returned it, unopened. Even the Beirut hostages Waite, Keenan and McCarthy listened to a radio. This is torture."

"I suggest... we look beyond this virus and ask how our current state of fear and its mass obedience will be exploit­ed in future. Will the workers ‘stood down’ ever see their jobs again? Will artificial intelligence consume freedoms that have been suspended? As Edward Snowden says, the disease of mass surveillance will outlast this pandemic. Will Julian Assange... persecuted for the crime of truthful journalism, survive?"

"That Assange has been right all along, and getting him to Sweden was a fraud to cover an American plan to “render” him, is finally becoming clear to many who swallowed the incessant scuttlebutt of character assassination. “I speak fluent Swedish and was able to read all the original documents,” Nils Melzer, the United Nations Rapporteur on Torture, said recently, “I could hardly believe my eyes. According to the testimony of the woman in question, a rape had never taken place at all. And not only that: the woman’s testimony was later changed by the Stockholm Police without her involvement in order to somehow make it sound like a possible rape. I have all the documents in my possession, the emails, the text messages.” ... WikiLeaks has informed us how illegal wars are fabricated, how governments are overthrown and violence is used in our name, how we are spied upon through our phones and screens. The true lies of presidents, ambassadors, political candidates, generals, proxies, political fraudsters have been exposed. One by one, these would-be emperors have realised they have no clothes. It has been an unprecedented public service; above all, it is authentic journalism, whose value can be judged by the degree of apoplexy of the corrupt and their apologists."

"The Trump administration is seeking extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States for trial on charges carrying 175 years in prison... The treaty between the U.S. and the U.K. prohibits extradition for a “political offense.” Assange was indicted for exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is a classic political offense. Moreover, Assange’s extradition would violate the legal prohibition against sending a person to a country where he is in danger of being tortured."

"WikiLeaks... published nearly 400,000 field reports about the Iraq War, which contained evidence of U.S. war crimes, over 15,000 previously unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians, and the systematic murder, torture, rape and abuse by the Iraqi army and authorities that were ignored by U.S. forces. In addition, WikiLeaks published the Guantánamo Files, 779 secret reports that revealed the U.S. government’s systematic violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, by abusing nearly 800 men and boys, ages 14 to 89. One of the most notorious releases by WikiLeaks was the 2007 “Collateral Murder” video, which showed a U.S. Army Apache helicopter target and fire on unarmed civilians in Baghdad. More than 12 civilians were killed, including two Reuters reporters and a man who came to rescue the wounded. Two children were injured. Then a U.S. Army tank drove over one of the bodies, severing it in half. Those acts constitute three separate war crimes prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Army Field Manual."

"The real purpose of state secrecy is to enable governments to establish their own self-interested and often mendacious version of the truth by the careful selection of “facts” to be passed on to the public. They feel enraged by any revelation of what they really know, or by any alternative source of information. Such threats to their control of the news agenda must be suppressed where possible and, where not, those responsible must be pursued and punished. Revealing important information about the Yemen war – in which at least 70,000 people have been killed – is the reason why the US government is persecuting both Assange and Zikry."

"The greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history, Lenin Moreno, allowed the British police to enter our embassy in London to arrest Assange. Moreno is a corrupt man, but what he has done is a crime that humanity will never forget."

"Ecuador has signed a $4.2bn programme with the IMF, signalling a final break by President Lenín Moreno with the policies of his leftist predecessor [Rafael Correa] in a deal that he said saved the country from becoming like Venezuela. The loan to the Opec country forms part of a larger $10bn package with other multilateral lenders to support Ecuador’s struggling economy, which is burdened by external debt that grew under former president Rafael Correa, in part due to oil-backed loans from China. Over the past two years, Mr Moreno has sought to reform the economy, while also distancing himself from the more controversial political positions of Mr Correa, who ruled Ecuador for a decade. The leftist firebrand, who faces multiple corruption charges in Ecuador and now lives in Belgium, was a close ally of socialist regimes such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Bolivia. Notoriously, he gave political asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy in London. The IMF deal comes on the seventh anniversary of Mr Assange’s asylum at the embassy. Ecuador’s extended fund facility with the IMF, which must still be approved by the Washington-based lender’s board...” said... the IMF mission chief to Ecuador."

"The former NSA analyst [Edward Snowden] mentioned the fact that Ecuador got $4.2 billion in funds from the International Monetary Fund in early March as a sign the country was getting closer to the West, and in turn more inclined to give up Assange. “Journalists who have been covering the story haven’t really been looking at that, because Julian as an individual is such a tragically flawed figure,” Snowden said. Snowden also criticized people who changed their minds about Assange after the 2016 election.“A lot of Americans now hate Julian,” he said. “Even though the sort of people who are on the center to the left part of the spectrum had been singing his praises during the Bush administration, now they’re on the other side because of his unfortunate political choices in the 2016 elections.”"

"It was meant to be a routine visit by a journalist to another journalist. Instead, I found myself locked in a cold, surveilled room for over an hour by Ecuadorian officials, as a furious argument raged between the country’s ambassador and Julian Assange on Monday. The room was inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where 2019 Nobel Peace Prize nominee Julian Assange currently lives under the ostensible protection of political asylum. Yet the WikiLeaks publisher was barred from entering the room, where he was supposed to join me for a pre-approved meeting, because he refused to submit to a full-body search and continuous surveillance. The visit to the publisher had, in fact, become eerily similar to visits I have made to inmates at federal penitentiaries in the US. It seemed our government was getting what they wanted from Ecuador, as a former senior State Department official told Buzzfeed in January, “as far as we’re concerned, he’s in jail.” Assange, clearly agitated, demands to know “why are you surveilling me speaking to a US journalist? Do you think it’s unreasonable for me to expect privacy when I meet with a journalist? Why are you silent?”"

"Julian [Assange] is a distinguished Australian, who has changed the way many people think about duplicitous governments. For this, he is a political refugee subjected to what the United Nations calls “arbitrary detention”. The UN says he has the right of free passage to freedom, but this is denied. He has the right to medical treatment without fear of arrest, but this is denied. He has the right to compensation, but this is denied. As founder and editor of WikiLeaks, his crime has been to make sense of dark times. WikiLeaks has an impeccable record of accuracy and authenticity which no newspaper, no TV channel, no radio station, no BBC, no New York Times, no Washington Post, no Guardian can equal. Indeed, it shames them. That explains why he is being punished."

"The persecution of Julian Assange is the conquest of us all: of our independence, our self respect, our intellect, our compassion, our politics, our culture. So stop scrolling. Organise. Occupy. Insist. Persist. Make a noise. Take direct action. Be brave and stay brave. Defy the thought police. War is not peace, freedom is not slavery, ignorance is not strength. If Julian can stand up, so can you: so can all of us."

"WikiLeaks is possibly the most exciting development in journalism in my lifetime. As an investigative journalist, I have often had to rely on the courageous, principled acts of whistle-blowers. The truth about the Vietnam War was told when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers. The truth about Iraq and Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia and many other flashpoints was told when WikiLeaks published the revelations of whistle-blowers."

"When you consider that 100 percent of WikiLeaks leaks are authentic and accurate, you can understand the impact, as well as the fury generated among secretive powerful forces. Julian Assange is a political refugee in London for one reason only: WikiLeaks told the truth about the greatest crimes of the 21st century. He is not forgiven for that, and he should be supported by journalists and by people everywhere."

"WikiLeaks has achieved far more than what The New York Times and The Washington Post in their celebrated incarnations did. No newspaper has come close to matching the secrets and lies of power that Assange and Snowden have disclosed. That both men are fugitives is indicative of the retreat of liberal democracies from principles of freedom and justice. Why is WikiLeaks a landmark in journalism? Because its revelations have told us, with 100 per cent accuracy, how and why much of the world is divided and run."

"Some 300 newspapers, large and small, joined today in publishing... editorials defending the First Amendment’s freedom of the press... their own efforts to combat current threats to that freedom posed by President Trump’s attacks on journalists and the entire Fourth Estate, which Trump routinely denounces in tweets and at rallies as “enemies of the people.”"

"However, missing from most of these full-throated editorials is any real defense of those who are in the trenches doing the hardest job of a free press, which is exposing the worst offenses of government: the war crimes, the craven systemic corruption of the political system, and the purveying of propaganda and disinformation in the furtherance of anti-democratic policies."

"Nowhere does one read.. a condemnation of the five-year torture and pursuit of [alternative media] journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been holed up in the London embassy of Ecuador... His real crime, and the thing the US wants... him...for, is publishing leaked Pentagon documents and videotapes proving a policy in the Iraq war of massive and deliberate war crimes...Because a press freedom is under serious attack these days, certainly by President Trump, but also by a corporate media itself that supports a censored internet and a two-tiered access to high-speed internet — both of which measures threaten alternative news media — and that fail to firmly support and defend the whistleblowers who often are critically important in bringing urgent stories of government and corporate wrongdoing to light."

"Assange was once feted and courted by some of the largest media organizations in the world, including The New York Times and The Guardian, for the information he possessed. But once his trove of material documenting U.S. war crimes, much of it provided by Chelsea Manning, was published by these media outlets he was pushed aside and demonized. A leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch dated March 8, 2008, exposed a black propaganda campaign to discredit WikiLeaks and Assange... to destroy the "feeling of trust" that is WikiLeaks' "center of gravity" and blacken Assange’s reputation. It largely has worked..."

"The Democratic Party— seeking to blame its election defeat on Russian "interference" rather than the grotesque income inequality, the betrayal of the working class, the loss of civil liberties, the deindustrialization and the corporate coup d’état that the party helped orchestrate — attacks Assange as a traitor, although he is not a U.S. citizen. Nor is he a spy. He is not bound by any law I am aware of to keep U.S. government secrets. He has not committed a crime...."

"WikiLeaks and Assange have done more to expose the dark machinations and crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization. Assange, in addition to exposing atrocities and crimes committed by the United States military in our endless wars and revealing the inner workings of the Clinton campaign, made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency, their surveillance programs and their interference in foreign elections...And WikiLeaks worked swiftly to save Edward Snowden, who exposed the wholesale surveillance of the American public by the government, from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow..."

"What is happening to Assange should terrify the press...The silence about the treatment of Assange is not only a betrayal of him but a betrayal of the freedom of the press itself. We will pay dearly for this complicity.... Assange is on his own. Each day is more difficult for him. This is by design. It is up to us to protest. We are his last hope, and the last hope, I fear, for a free press."

"He not only is one of the few authentic heroes of our time, he also has shown to all of us how to be a hero today and that it is possible to be a hero today."

"The world we live in is ruled by insiders...insiders do not tell outsiders the truth, and they do not turn against other insiders... Julian... created the technology that allowed the outsiders to get a glimpse within... and this is why he's being persecuted... He's been accused of a crime for which he's never been charged, that turns progressives against feminists and feminists against progressives. This attempt by the establishment to turn progressives against themselves... to prosecute someone who has... revealed their crimes is a heinous crime in itself...""

"Late in 2012, Assange announced the formation of the WikiLeaks Party in Australia. The party nominated Senate candidates in three states, with Assange running for office in Victoria. (He stumped via Skype from his refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy.) It had been expected that WikiLeaks would ultimately throw its support to the Green Party—especially after the party's National Council voted in favor of such a move. Instead, WikiLeaks aligned with a collection of far-right parties. One was the nativist Australia First, whose most prominent figure was a former neo-Nazi previously convicted of coordinating a shotgun attack on the home of an Australian representative of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. Members of the WikiLeaks Party blamed the flap on an "administrative error"; mass resignations from the party's leadership followed. Those who quit cited a lack of transparency in the party's operations, and some pointed to remarks Assange had made blasting a Green Party proposal to reform Australia's harsh treatment of asylum seekers. For his part, Assange welcomed the walkout, saying that it had eliminated elements that were "holding the party back." He won 1.24 percent of the vote [in the 2013 Australian federal election]."

"I have just watched We Steal Secrets, Alex Gibney’s documentary about Wikileaks and Julian Assange. One useful thing I learnt is the difference between a hatchet job and character assassination. Gibney is too clever for a hatchet job, and his propaganda is all the more effective for it. The film’s contention is that Assange is a natural-born egotist... This could have made for an intriguing, and possibly plausible, thesis had Gibney approached the subject-matter more honestly and fairly. But two major flaws discredit the whole enterprise... The first is that he grievously misrepresents the facts in the Swedish case against Assange... to the point that his motives in making the film are brought into question... So the question is why would he choose to mislead the audience?... his dishonesty relates not to an avoidance of facts and evidence but to his choice of emphasis...This documentary could have been a fascinating study of the moral quandaries faced by whistleblowers in the age of the surveillance super-state. Instead Gibney chose the easy course and made a film that sides with the problem rather than the solution."

"A legitimate, registered, multi award-winning media organisation and its editor have legally published the truth about the biggest superpower in the world and embarrassed them and exposed them for wrongdoing - war crimes, corruption and fraud...The whole exercise has been set up to smear and silence the truth and those countries with their snouts in the trough with America have fallen into line. Ecuador, whose snout isn't in the trough, has not fallen into line."

"Wikileaks' Julian Assange is providing ammunition to those who believe that the fragile new world of cybersecurity demands a more flexible approach to the rules of engagement."

"[Preparations for Assange's 40th birthday party] I'm not sure who else is going, but the initial invitation did not give train information, but did tell you where to land your private plane."

"A dead man can't leak stuff. This guy's a traitor, a treasonist, and he has broken every law of the United States. The guy ought to be — And I'm not for the death penalty, so if I'm not for the death penalty, there's only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch."

"Assange has crowned a year of bad-tempered conflicts by falling out with himself and introducing to the language that novelty the "unauthorised autobiography". (I was thinking of writing my own autobiography but I've withdrawn co-operation from myself.) There's a pleasing irony in the spectacle of someone who wanted to publish so much confidential information trying to suppress a book based on interviews he gave freely to a ghostwriter."

"I knew years before the Pentagon Papers came out that the Americans were being lied in to an essentially hopeless war. I’m not proud of the fact that it didn’t occur to me that my oath of office, which was to support the Constitution, called on me to put that information out and say, ‘64, when the war might have been avoided. But I certainly am glad that I finally came aware of what my real responsibilities were there. And I did put it out years later. At times, at that time, which published it, the “Times,” and the 18 other newspapers, which defied President Nixon’s injunctions and did put it out, were in the position of Julian Assange is in now."

"Julian Assange is perhaps the most noteworthy investigative journalist in the world today, and he has made a career out of dragging into the sunlight information that powerful people want to keep hidden."

"His skills as a cryptographer led him to becoming one of the architects of the WikiLeaks model, but as Gavin MacFadyen, the director of the Centre of Investigative Journalism and a friend of his, points out, there's something almost old-fashioned about his particular brand of committed idealism. "We don't really see people like him any more. In the 60s and 70s, they were around. Those who are totally committed and passionate about what they're doing. But not after 20 years of Thatcherism... There's no doubt he's an inspirational figure...probably the most intelligent person I've ever worked with" ... When you interview Assange, this seems like an understatement. He is at least five steps ahead. Probably more... he told the New Yorker, what appealed to him about computers was their austerity: "It is like chess – chess is very austere, in that you don't have many rules, there is no randomness, and the problem is very hard.".. Combat, intellectual combat, seems to be his stimulant of choice. It just fuels him."

"The cunning of Julian Assange's strategy is that he has made everyone complicit in his own private decision to try to sabotage U.S. foreign policy. Unless you consider yourself bound by the hysterically stupid decision of the Obama administration to forbid all federal employees from downloading or viewing the WikiLeaks papers, you will at the very least have indulged in a certain amount of guilty pleasure."

"Assange’s attorney has promised that if anything happens to his client, WikiLeaks will release a “nuclear bomb” of even more damaging information … If Assange sincerely believes that he needs to blackmail the U.S. government into refraining from assassinating him, he is delusional as well as conceited. Assange’s supporters ought to be upset by the revelation that the supposed champion of transparency has deliberately been holding the good stuff back. After all, authentic whistle-blowers would release the most damaging information at the beginning — not withhold it as a bargaining chip to intimidate prosecutors."

"Assange's thoughts often have this tone of cerebral sangfroid, even when the subject is violence and death. Politically, he appears to be an ultra-libertarian, but with a mathematician's analytical bent."

"(About Pope Francis) He has provided great solace and comfort and we are extremely appreciative for his reaching out to our family in this way. He understands that Julian is suffering and is concerned."

"There is no god but God and Muhammad (aws) is God’s prophet and messenger; the purpose of life is to establish a loving relationship with The One through a hermeneutic engagement with God’s signs (ayat) in revelation, creation, and in the human mind and heart; such a purpose requires a wholehearted commitment to learning in all its forms…"

"The Muslim Anarchist Charter rejects absolutely: all forms of violence and political coercion; all forms of racism and prejudice, including Islamophobia, homophobia and neurelitism."

"Al-Buraq to Earth. Contact made. Link established with planet Earth. Kamal, onboard computer, setting up Mission Log in accordance with first contact communication protocols. Set up complete. Awaiting further instructions."

"I'm a long-haul Cosmic anthropologist, which means I hop around isolate-planets (like Earth) in order to study Advanced Language Species (like homo sapiens). I specialise in First Stage Globalization (FSG) terrestrials. Most FSG planets have whole-world silicon-based communication technologies in situ, and thus as soon as I’m near enough, I ’plug in’, and shortly after make contact. Well, I’ve been plugged in for quite some time, but this is my first contact. Sorry about that."

"Al-Buraq to Earth. Contact made. Kamal, onboard computer, setting up link between (1) mind of mixed-species hominid on Planet Earth, and (2) cortico helmet of Captain Jul. Scanning planet for mixed-species hominid. One mixed-species hominid identified. Name: Yakoub Islam. Consent obtained. Link established with Yakoub’s mind. Set up complete."

"We’ve been listening into and watching your planet’s radio and television transmissions ever since Reginald Fessenden proclaimed, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good willies’, back in 1906. Since then, our research at the University of Weagu Tafrid has focused primarily on the concept of human “celebrity”."

"Celebrity has merged human institutions into a “much-of-a-mulchness”, such that the values surrounding political leaders and infamous sex workers are becoming increasingly indistinguisable."

"Riots may be symptoms of a deeper socio-political malaise: the product of unjust government policy and racist policing. I know from friends I have spoken to who were participants in the 1981 Brixton riots, that riots can engender a great deal of local solidarity against an oppressive State. But I am far from convinced that energy spent doing damage to life, limb and property is likely to prove more productive than properly thought-out and planned non-violent direct action. More likely the opposite."

"There is, I believe, a great deal to be learned from faith traditions – from the ordinary people who practice them today; from their sacred texts and writings and artefacts; and from their histories. Faith traditions present a rich and diverse vein of human experience, and I am convinced that — as with other humanities — a serious interest in them is a cultural education in itself."

"Learning is something I’m good at, given the right conditions. Drop me in the middle of an academic subject I care about, and that has relatively clearly defined boundaries, and I can do "expert" more quickly and more comprehensively than most. It’s not vacuous memorization: I’m no savant. What I do is create a schema of fundamental knowledge and understandings, usually over-learned using SQ3R, and that schema then becomes a powerful magnet for related information."

"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it."

"There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?"

"I’m a teenage kid who’s interested in improving the world (mostly through law, politics, and technology). This year, I’m going to try to update my weblog daily with interesting thoughts, program some interesting new website software, and work on some website projects that help people better understand what’s going on in American politics."

"I think that most people, when faced with overwhelming facts, will come around. (I know I certainly have.) But it is definitely difficult to overcome people’s entrenched beliefs, so I feel that if I only convince people that the other side is a reasonable position to take, even if they themselves don’t take it, then I’ve been a success. It is sort of a quixotic task in that sense, but it’s also useful to me by helping clarify my ideas. When you say something particularly controversial on the Web, you’ll get all sorts of people coming at you with arguments. Considering those arguments and seeing if they’re right or, if they’re wrong, why they’re wrong, has been very valuable in clarifying my beliefs (and similarly, I hope my challenges have helped other people clarify their beliefs)."

"The law about what is stealing is very clear. Stealing is taking something away from someone so they cannot use it. There’s no way that making a copy of something is stealing under that definition. If you make a copy of something, you’ll be prosecuted for copyright infringement or something similar — not larceny (the legal term for stealing). Stealing, like piracy and intellectual property, is another one of those terms cooked up to make us think of intellectual works the same way we think of physical items. But the two are very different. You can’t just punish people because they took away a “potential sale”. Earthquakes take away potential sales, as do libraries and rental stores and negative reviews. Competitors also take away potential sales."

"Geeks seem a lot more willing to treat people based on what they can do rather than who they are. This isn’t unique to kids, of course. The Internet has an amazingly liberating aspect for everyone from blacks to the blind. So perhaps that’s one reason why I’m especially concerned about draconian proposals for an “Internet Drivers License” or a crackdown on anonymity. Quite aside from the impracticality and ineffectiveness of these proposals, they could have the effect of tagging who people are, and reintroducing those indicators that the Internet has removed."

"On the one hand, I want to be very open about everything, On the other, I heavily defend people’s right to privacy. Of course, as you point out, keeping your privacy is hard because if you slip once, it’s out there forever. I’m not sure what to say to people who want to protect their privacy except, be careful when you give out private information and think about where it could end up."

"Think deeply about things. Don’t just go along because that’s the way things are or that’s what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think."

"There’s a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in or a violent smashing of shop windows? Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom to murder? This bill would be a huge, potentially permanent, loss. If we lost the ability to communicate with each other over the Internet, it would be a change to the Bill of Rights. The freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on, would be suddenly deleted. New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights we had always taken for granted."

"The people rose up, and they caused a sea change in Washington — not the press, which refused to cover the story — just coincidentally, their parent companies all happened to be lobbying for the bill; not the politicians, who were pretty much unanimously in favor of it; and not the companies, who had all but given up trying to stop it and decided it was inevitable. It was really stopped by the people, the people themselves. They killed the bill dead, so dead that when members of Congress propose something now that even touches the Internet, they have to give a long speech beforehand about how it is definitely not like SOPA; so dead that when you ask congressional staffers about it, they groan and shake their heads like it’s all a bad dream they’re trying really hard to forget; so dead that it’s kind of hard to believe this story, hard to remember how close it all came to actually passing, hard to remember how this could have gone any other way. But it wasn’t a dream or a nightmare; it was all very real. And it will happen again. Sure, it will have yet another name, and maybe a different excuse, and probably do its damage in a different way. But make no mistake: The enemies of the freedom to connect have not disappeared. The fire in those politicians’ eyes hasn’t been put out. There are a lot of people, a lot of powerful people, who want to clamp down on the Internet. And to be honest, there aren’t a whole lot who have a vested interest in protecting it from all of that. Even some of the biggest companies, some of the biggest Internet companies, to put it frankly, would benefit from a world in which their little competitors could get censored. We can’t let that happen."

"We won this fight because everyone made themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial freedom. They threw themselves into it. They did whatever they could think of to do. They didn’t stop to ask anyone for permission. … The senators were right: The Internet really is out of control. But if we forget that, if we let Hollywood rewrite the story so it was just big company Google who stopped the bill, if we let them persuade us we didn’t actually make a difference, if we start seeing it as someone else’s responsibility to do this work and it’s our job just to go home and pop some popcorn and curl up on the couch to watch Transformers, well, then next time they might just win. Let’s not let that happen."

"Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more. Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims."

"Aaron, a hero of the internet and a legend among men, was targeted by a corrupt system that sought to make an example out of him. He faced a harsher punishment than murderers, robbers, child pornographers, or even terrorist sympathizers! All for doing nothing more than downloading academic articles."

"Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz was killed. Killed because he faced an impossible choice. Killed because he was forced into playing a game he could not win — a twisted and distorted perversion of justice — a game where the only winning move was not to play. Anonymous immediately convened an emergency council to discuss our response to this tragedy. After much heavy-hearted discussion, the decision was upheld to engage the United States Department of Justice and its associated executive branches in a game of a similar nature, a game in which the only winning move is not to play."

"We’ve lost a fighter. We’ve lost somebody who put huge energy into righting wrongs. There are people around the world who take it on themselves to just try to fix the world but very few of them do it 24/7 like Aaron. Very few of them are as dedicated. So of the people who are fighting for right, and what he was doing up to the end was fighting for right, we have lost one of our own. … We’ve lost a great person. But also, we’ve lost somebody who needed to be nurtured, who needed to be protected. I didn’t work with Aaron as closely as many people here, but I got the sense that all who have known him realized that he needed to be protected. He needed to be held carefully in our hands. He needed to be nurtured. So nurturers of the world, everyone who tried to make a place safe to work or a home safe to live, anyone who listens to another, looks after another or feeds another, all parents everywhere — we’ve lost a child. And there’s nothing worse than that."

"Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill, and intelligence about people and issues. I think he could have revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still yet do so. Somewhere in there, Aaron's recklessness put him right in harm's way. Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn't an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn't done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out. Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on."

"From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed."

"Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you. For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.” In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it. Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame. One word, and endless tears."

"I received an email from JSTOR four days before Aaron died, from the president of JSTOR, announcing, celebrating that JSTOR was going to release all of these journal articles to anybody around the world who wanted access — exactly what Aaron was fighting for. And I didn’t have time to send it to Aaron; I was on — I was traveling. But I looked forward to seeing him again — I had just seen him the week before — and celebrating that this is what had happened. So, all of us think there are a thousand things we could have done, a thousand things we could have done, and we have to do, because Aaron Swartz is now an icon, an ideal. He is what we will be fighting for, all of us, for the rest of our lives."

"Every time you saw Aaron, he was surrounded by five or 10 different people who loved and respected and worked with him. He was depressed because he was increasingly recognizing that the idealism he brought to this fight maybe wasn’t enough. When he saw all of his wealth gone, and he recognized his parents were going to have to mortgage their house so he could afford a lawyer to fight a government that treated him as if he were a 9/11 terrorist, as if what he was doing was threatening the infrastructure of the United States, when he saw that and he recognized how — how incredibly difficult that fight was going to be, of course he was depressed. Now, you know, I’m not a psychiatrist. I don’t know whether there was something wrong with him because of — you know, beyond the rational reason he had to be depressed, but I don’t — I don’t — I don’t have patience for people who want to say, "Oh, this was just a crazy person; this was just a person with a psychological problem who killed himself." No. This was somebody — this was somebody who was pushed to the edge by what I think of as a kind of bullying by our government. A bullying by our government. And just as we hold people responsible when their bullying leads to tragedy, I hope Carmen Ortiz does what MIT did and … lead an investigation, ask somebody independent to look at what happened here and explain to America: Is this what the United States government is?"

"I think that the best legacy that — the best tribute we can pay to Aaron’s legacy is to continue to fight as hard as we can to make this world a more just, fairer place. That’s the thing that he cared most about. And I’m going to keep doing that. … I also hope that this can serve as a wake-up call for the broader issues in the criminal justice system. It’s not just this one act. Our system is deeply, deeply unfair. And as I said earlier, millions of people suffer because of it needlessly. And I hope that — you know, in this country, it’s very hard for people to — for politicians to look weak on crime, but that’s not what this is. This is — this is about justice, and nobody should have to face what Aaron faced. And I hope we can help save people in the future."

"Aaron believed that [...] you literally ought to be asking yourself all the time: "What is the most important thing I could be working on in the world right now, and if you are not working on that, why aren't you?""

"THE CORRUPT FEAR US · THE HONEST SUPPORT US · THE HEROIC JOIN US."

"We share the collective idea of ANONYMOUS worldwide; we are the people. We believe in non-violent, peaceful civil disobedience. Throughout history the world has been controlled by big ideologies such as religion, socialism and capitalism to name but a few. These are all forms of slavery that have stopped our evolution and removed our freedom. ANONYMOUS see these ideologies for what they are, SYSTEMS OF CONTROL. The time for change is now. No longer shall the people be oppressed by corruption."

"We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."

"The tendency to relate past events to what is possible in the present becomes more difficult as the scope of the geopolitical environment changes. It is a useful thing, then, to ask every once in a while if the environment has recently undergone any particular severe changes, thereby expanding our options for the future. Terminology, let alone our means of exchanging information, has changed to such a degree that many essential discussions in today's "communications age" would be entirely incomprehensible to many two decades ago. As the social, political and technological environment has developed, some have already begun to explore new options, seizing new chances for digital activism — and more will soon join in. It is time for the rest of the world to understand why."

"I have been involved with Anonymous in some capacity or another for about six years. Looking back at my writing over that time, I have found that my predictions, while always enthusiastic, nonetheless turned out to have been conservative; when Australia became the first state to come under attack by this remarkable force, I proposed that we would someday see such allegedly inevitable institutions begin to crumble in the face of their growing irrelevance. Someday turned out to be this year. I predict that Anonymous and entities like it will become far more significant over the next few years than is expected by most of our similarly irrelevant pundits — and this will, no doubt, turn out to be just as much of an understatement as anything else that has been written on the subject. … This is the future, whether one approves or not, and the failure on the part of governments and media alike to understand, and contend with the rapid change now afoot, ought to remind everyone concerned why it is that this movement is necessary in the first place."

"Anonymous from all over the world will hunt you down. You should know that we will find you and we will not let you go. We will launch the biggest operation ever against you. Expect massive cyber attacks. War is declared. Get prepared. The French people are stronger than you and will come out of this atrocity even stronger."

"You can't stop the monsoon"

"Hello, leaders of Scientology. We are Anonymous."

"Over the years, we have been watching you. Your campaigns of misinformation; your suppression of dissent; your litigious nature, all of these things have caught our eye. With the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation, the extent of your malign influence over those who have come to trust you as leaders has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed. For the good of your followers; for the good of mankind; and for our own enjoyment, we shall proceed to expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form."

"We recognize you as serious opponents, and do not expect our campaign to be completed in a short time frame. However, you will not prevail forever against the angry masses of the body politic. Your choice of methods, your hypocrisy, and the general artlessness of your organization have sounded its death knell. You have nowhere to hide because we are everywhere."

"You will find no recourse in attack because for each of us that falls, ten more will take his place. We are cognizant of the many who may decry our methods as parallel to those of the Church of Scientology. Those who espouse the obvious truth that your organization will use the actions of Anonymous as an example of the persecution of which you have for so long warned your followers. This is acceptable to Anonymous; in fact, it is encouraged."

"We are your SPs. Over time, as we begin to merge our pulse with that of your church, the suppression of your followers will become increasingly difficult to maintain. Believers will become aware that salvation needn't come at the expense of their livelihood. They will become aware that the stress and the frustration that they feel is not due to us, but a source much closer to them."

"Yes, we are SPs but the sum of suppression we could ever muster is eclipsed by that of your own RTC."

"Knowledge is free."

"We are Anonymous."

"We are Legion."

"We do not forgive."

"We do not forget."

"Expect us."

"Dear US Citizens,"

"We, Anonymous, would like to offer you, America, the opportunity to join and support our movement. We are a group that formed on the internet—one that knows no constructs or absolutes, and one that has recently grown exponentially. We would like to introduce an Operation. An Operation that involves Americans getting our Natural Rights and dreams back. Right now, you can help by passing on the Information. Information is Power. Share the Power of the Information with other like-minded individuals. The more people we represent, the more Power we have, both as individuals and as Anonymous. Thank you for your time and your Power."

"CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA"

"Many events have taken shape over the course of only a few years, and slowly our system has been working towards the gains of itself rather than the gains of its people. While we all have watched and rallied against the system working against us, there have been other gains of the system that have gone without a peep as back room deals and bargaining allow for the passing of legislation and research funding that has resulted in the loss of more liberties such as censorship, phone and Internet surveillance and eminent domain laws, Not to mention the higher taxes, lower wages, and loss of work due to exports deals. We repeat the history of our mistakes instead of evolving our society. Generations in the past spoke of what we face as current issues, the only difference being that of our technological advancements. We have forgotten such words our society has found guidance and value in:"

""We hold these truths to be self-evident,"

"That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,"

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.""

"In the past few months, Anonymous has made headlines through the actions of a few. The media tries to instill fear of which Anonymous is as a “group”, and in the process failed to recognize it as an “ideal” that is gaining momentum."

"Anonymous is an ideal that the people can use to further help other people. In this case, you’re not being heard and transparency in government operations is non-existent in many matters. Mobilize yourself to find your information, and we’ll be giving you resources to further help you. Take the information you find and tell your government your demands."

"We want AMERICANS to wake up! We want AMERICANS to read! We want AMERICANS to think, and above all question all things! We want AMERICANS to analyze, criticize, critique and learn to read between the lines, to expose and to deconstruct! We want you to believe in the infinite power of the people! We want you to learn that we’re all truly brothers and sisters in humanity regardless of all the artificial barriers that have been set up to separate us!"

""Think For Yourself, Question Authority" - Timothy Leary"

"Inform. Educate. Guide. Evolve. Wake up the People. The time for the next step in our species’ social evolution has come!"

"To effectively reform the system that has enslaved us, we must consider following the advice and example of those who have preceded us. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and JFK are good places to start. All took fierce positions against central banking, government corruption and corporate power."

"The time has come for us to unite, the time has come for us to stand up and fight! You are Anonymous!"

"We are in the information era."

"We are Anonymous,"

"We are Legion,"

"We do not forget,"

"We do not forgive,"

"Citizens of the United States, We are Anonymous."

"This is an urgent emergency alert to all people of the United States. The day we've all been waiting for has unfortunately arrived. The United States is censoring the internet. Our blatant response is that we will not sit while our rights are taken away by the government we trusted them to preserve. This is not a call to arms, but a call to recognition and action!"

"The United States government has mastered this corrupt way of giving us a false sense of freedom. We think we are free and can do what we want, but in reality we are very limited and restricted as to what we can do, how we can think, and even how our education is obtained. We have been so distracted by this mirage of freedom, that we have just become what we were trying to escape from."

"For too long, we have been idle as our brothers and sisters were arrested. During this time, the government has been scheming, plotting ways to increase censorship through means of I S P block aides, D N S blockings, search engine censorship, website censorship, and a variety of other methods that directly oppose the values and ideas of both Anonymous as well as the founding fathers of this country, who believed in free speech and press!"

"The United States has often been used as an example of the ideal free country. When the one nation that is known for its freedom and rights start to abuse its own people, this is when you must fight back, because others are soon to follow. Do not think that just because you are not a United States citizen, that this does not apply to you. You cannot wait for your country to decide to do the same. You must stop it before it grows, before it becomes acceptable. You must destroy its foundation before it becomes too powerful."

"Has the U.S. government not learned from the past? Has it not seen the 2011 revolutions? Has it not seen that we oppose this wherever we find it and that we will continue to oppose it? Obviously the United States Government thinks they are exempt. This is not only an Anonymous collective call to action. What will a Distributed Denial of Service attack do? What's a website de face ment against the corrupted powers of the government? No. This is a call for a worldwide internet and physical protest against the powers that be. Spread this message everywhere. We will not stand for this! Tell your parents, your neighbors, your fellow workers, your school teachers, and anyone else you come in contact with. This affects anyone that desires the freedom to browse anonymously, speak freely without fear of retribution, or protest without fear of arrest."

"Go to every I R C network, every social network, every online community, and tell them of the atrocity that is about to be committed. If protest is not enough, the United States government shall see that we are truly legion and we shall come together as one force opposing this attempt to censor the internet once again, and in the process discourage any other government from continuing or trying."

"We do not forgive censorship."

"We do not forget the denial of our free rights as human beings."

"To the United States government, you should've expected us."

"To the Citizens of the United States and the United States Government."

"In the past few months, our collective has been organizing the operation known as Operation Blackout. Part of the operation's purpose was to alert the people of the coming bill that was to be called the Stop Online Piracy Act."

"This Act would give Congress the power to censor any internet website they wish without consent from the Citizens of the United States. This act would've also had the power to jail any person who infringed on its new copyright law for an equivalence of five years. This copyright law would've had the power to destroy social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube. Video gameplay and free movies would cease to exist."

"However, Operation Blackout was a success. As a collective, we've managed to spread the word and alert the masses. Internet giants such as Google, Wikipedia, and Reddit became hand-in-hand with us as we all managed to make an impact on the decisions of our, "free government". But as we've seen with Megaupload, the government may not need a bill to be passed to get their way. Other operations we've conducted over this time period have awaken the people to the nightmare that is the United States Government. Sections 1031 and 1032 of the National Defense Authorization Act have been ratified. Yet we face new threats."

"The United States Government is seeking to pass the Cyber Security Act of 2012. This act is as Orwellian as it sounds; it will endanger our collective and we will not stand by and watch while this government of lies prepares to take away our freedoms. The National Security Agency insists on labeling us as a leaderless, terrorist organization. The question is, "who do we terrorize?". Can it possibly be that the United States government is truly scared of us? Nevertheless, The time for action is now."

"Our collective has realized, along with many United States citizens, that the current government is no longer functional. Our economy is unstable, our representatives uncooperative, and our system, destroyed."

"We are not calling upon the collective to deface or use a distributed denial of service attack on a United States government agency website or affiliate. We are not calling upon the people to occupy a city or protest in front of a local building. This has not brought on us any legislative change or alternate law. It has only brought us bloodshed and false criticism. For the last 12 years, voting was useless. Corporations and lobbyists are the true leaders of this country and are the ones with the power to control our lives. To rebuild our government, we must first destroy it'."

"Our time for democracy is here."

"Our time for real change is here."

"This is America's time, to have its own revolution."

"Therefore, 'Anonymous has decided to openly declare war on the United States government. This is a call to arms. We call upon the Citizens of the United States to stand beside us in overthrowing this corrupted body and call upon a new era. Our allegiance is to the American people, because they are us, and we are them."

"Operation V, engaged."

"We are Americans."

"'We never Forgive."

"'We never Forget'."

"To the United States government, it's too late to expect us."

"Citizens of the world, Anonymous has observed for some time now the trajectory of justice in the United States with growing concern. We have marked the departure of this system from the noble ideals in which it was born and enshrined. We have seen the erosion of due process, the dilution of constitutional rights, the usurpation of the rightful authority of courts by the "discretion" of prosecutors. We have seen how the law is wielded less and less to uphold justice, and more and more to exercise control, authority and power in the interests of oppression or personal gain. We have been watching, and waiting. Two weeks ago today, a line was crossed. Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz was killed. Killed because he faced an impossible choice. Killed because he was forced into playing a game he could"

"We are #Anonymous We are involved in the biggest Anonymous op ever seen. That being said, we are worried that some governments will indeed see us as a threat and create some scenario to make us look bad (false flag). We only want peace, not war. We've been in the limelight before. We've made the news plenty of times, but never anything like what we are experiencing right now. We obviously know governments around the globe are watching what we are doing. Many of these governments have experienced our shenanigans. We abhor violence. We are anti-war. We are against police brutality. We have raised our fists in the air to stand against aggressor's time and time again. We would never choose to hurt anyone physically. Understand this and know this if any government says otherwise. Remember us when various powers turn their attention towards us, because it will happen. We can change the world for the better. That has always been the idea. Ideas are bulletproof."

"Amid the chaos, a hacktivist that hadn’t been seen in years made a return: Anonymous. The decentralised hacktivist collective known for their operations against the Church of Scientology, ISIS and during the Arab Spring has seemingly re-emerged, issuing a video message to the Minneapolis Police Department. In the video, released using the traditional imagery associated with Anonymous—a Guy Fawkes mask in the style of the film V for Vendetta and a distorted voice reading out the message... "This week’s brutal killing of George Floyd... is just the tip of the iceberg in a long list of high profile cases of wrongful deaths at the hands of officers in your state..." the message read."

"Anonymous is back in the headlines with claims that another attack on a U.S. police website is linked to the hactivist group. In the weeks since Anonymous hackers threatened Minneapolis Police Department (MPD), that it would “expose your many crimes to the world,” speculation has been rife as to whether the group has returned, or is it just others corralling the “brand.” That speculation will now intensify with these new claims that it has struck again. The target this time appears to be the Atlanta Police Department, with local media reports on Sunday that its website had been taken offline following the fatal police shooting of Rayshard Brooks...June 12... after he had fallen asleep in a Wendy’s drive through lane..."

""It's been the better part of a decade since the hacktivist group Anonymous rampaged across the internet, stealing and leaking millions of secret files from dozens of US organizations. Now, amid the global protests following the killing of George Floyd, Anonymous is back—and it's returned with a dump of hundreds of gigabytes of law enforcement files and internal communications. On Friday of last week, the Juneteenth holiday, a leak-focused activist group known as Distributed Denial of Secrets published a 269-gigabyte collection of police data that includes emails, audio, video, and intelligence documents, with more than a million files in total."

"It's the largest published hack of American law enforcement agencies," Emma Best, cofounder of DDOSecrets, wrote in a series of text messages. "It provides the closest inside look at the state, local, and federal agencies tasked with protecting the public, including [the] government response to COVID and the BLM protests... Due to the size of the dataset, we probably missed things," Best concedes. "I wish we could have done more, but I'm pleased with what we did and that we continue to learn." Best adds that the group pruned more than 50 gigabytes of data out of the files before publication out of what they describe as an abundance of caution, and will continue to scour that data for anything in the public interest that the group may publish later. Best notes, however, that DDOSecrets published the financial information knowingly, arguing that it could be correlated with other information to further expose police behavior in ways that serve the public interest. "The potential of the data, especially in the long run and when correlated with other datasets, outweighs any downsides to allowing the public to examine it," Best argues. They also have no qualms about publishing the personally identifiable information of police officers. "The public has an interest in the identities of public servants," they write."

"WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was hit with a new federal indictment on Wednesday accusing him of conspiring with hackers, including the group “Anonymous.”"

"Neat labels elude those commentators who have sought to categorize Anonymous as an entity. With little consistency, commentators have referred to Anonymous as hackers, activists, vigilantes, a movement, etc. Perhaps then, Anonymous itself is the best authority on what Anonymous is. On its website, Anonymous describes itself as “an internet gathering” rather than a “group.” Moreover, Anonymous states that it has “a very loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directives.” “Very loose” might be an understatement. The group is open to anyone and is often rife with dissent over its messages and operations, which is unsurprising given that Anonymous does not utilize formal procedures for conducting its operations. In August 2011, an Anonymous member spoke to the media about this process:"

"In one sense the actions of Anonymous are themselves, anonymously and unaccountably, censoring websites in response to positions with which they disagree. The goals of many Anonymous activists are a free and open internet, but the regular and blanket denial-of-service campaigns could easily be counter-productive if pro-Sopa and pro-Pipa advocates can portray these actions as representative of those who are against this legislation."

"In the UAE it is now illegal to wear a Guy Fawkes mask, the iconic symbol of the international hacktivist collective known as Anonymous. The clear implication of the new law is that the UAE government fears the power of the mask, and the Anonymous collective the mask represents."

"I reject the notion that technology is a neutral thing, so I see it as creating new capabilities for humanity. But then, these capabilities can be an object of conflict. And if you analyse p2p technology, it can take different forms. These different forms are the function of the forces which control the technology. For example, in what I call “netarchical capitalism,” that is where you have proprietory platforms, business-owned entities creating p2p front-ends, because they want people to communicate with each other, but they combine it with controlled and hierarchical back-ends, where they control the design and your personal data, so that they are able to sell your attention. So, when we talk about peer-to-peer technology, we have to be very careful, not just look at the structure: computers organised in a peer network, humans organised in a peer network etc., but you have to look at governance and ownership as well."

"Hacking is the clever circumvention of imposed limits, whether imposed by your government, your IP server, your own personality, or the laws of physics."

"Give us bandwidth or kill us!"

"Girls need modems!"

"I'm a future-hacker; I'm trying to get root access to the future. I want to raid its system of thought."

"I hate this waaaah-I'm-a-poor-sensitive-weak-woman-protect-me shit. This kind of stuff generates more contempt for women. So fuck niceness!"

"The United States, as you point out, has been actually freer than most in terms of offering access to information. It doesn't have to be this way. Openness is not the default in terms of how if you look back in time, or even around the world. We need to show how openness works better. That you end up with companies that thrive better. That you have, with standards, you have more competition that builds more jobs. That openness is a win."

"Here's the problem with the web — this is so cool, it's worth it. The internet is decentralized in the sense that you can kind of nuke any part of it and it still works. That was its original design. The World Wide Web isn't that way. You go and knock out any particular piece of hardware, it goes away. Can we make a reliable web that's served from many different places, kind of like how the Amazon cloud works, but for everybody? The answer is yes, you can. You can make kind of a pure to pure distribution structure, such that the web becomes reliable. Another is that we can make it private so that there's reader privacy. Edward Snowden has brought to light some really difficult architectural problems of the current World Wide Web. The GCHQ, the secret service of the British, watched everybody using WikiLeaks, and then offered all of those IP addresses, which are personally identifiable in the large part, to the NSA. The NSA had conversations about using that as a means to go and... monitor people at an enhanced level that those are now suspects. Libraries have long had history with people being rounded up for what they've read and bad things happening to them. We have an interest in trying to make it so that there’s reader privacy."

"If they succeed in destroying our books or even making many of them inaccessible, there will be a chilling effect on the hundreds of other libraries that lend digitized books as we do. This could be the burning of the Library of Alexandria moment—millions of books from our community's libraries—gone."

"He [Kahle] noted that libraries historically tend to grow in societies that prioritize education and decline in societies where power is being concentrated, and he’s worried about where the US is headed. That makes it hard to predict if IA—or any library project—will be supported in the long term."

"The nature of being raised in the way that I was, it's like, you get told you will be the future leaders of the world and then you get there and you find out the world is not enough."

"I did kind of construct a masculinity out of the best bits of every man that I could find, like the best bits of my brothers and my dad and the best bits of the Bond movies. I tried to do the man of the 21st century thing and, absolutely on it and woke but also compassionate and fun and charming and sexy and all the rest of it and with the muscles and the beard and, I tried to do all of it and it all made me sort of miserable really."

"The reason I left [my pre-transition videos] up is because I don't see Philosophy Tube as being about me, it's a bigger mission about education and people's relationship to knowledge that I am trying to live up to."

"On Philosophy Tube, I call all the shots, I do all the writing, I do all the research. I plan it all out, and it's my show. I miss the feeling of being at the bottom and having to climb up again."

"Security might never go back to the way it was. It can’t. The surveillance and the paranoia and the invasive measures can only ever expand, because it’s not actually grounded in any presently knowable facts about threat or safety. The whole game is about risk-managing the possible future, and since what might happen in the future is infinitely imaginable, the justification for more security becomes infinite too."

"It’s not so much that I need a reason not to have my privacy invaded, it’s that somebody else should have a reason to do it. That’s kind of the point. That’s surely what it means for something to be “none of your business”. And yet, to refuse the search is to immediately mark oneself out as suspicious, as concealing something that is in fact somebody else’s business, because of the security-logic presumption that everyone is guilty until proven innocent."

"The question I began this investigation with was, is security ever gonna go back to the way it was? And the answer I think I’m flying towards is: No, it isn’t. Unless you demand it."

"Since the position of the transphobe is that trans people don’t really exist, as trans people, and the position of trans people is obviously that they do exist, immediately we can see that no compromise is possible. Things either exist or they don’t, there’s no middle ground. So in any debate on this issue, it’s gonna be winner takes all. The trans person then is in the impossible situation of having to prove their own existence to someone who’s every response is gonna be, “How do you know?”"

"It’s perhaps unsurprising that many though not all people would decide that faced with an opponent whose entire position is the total denial of your humanity as the kind of human being that you are, the only winning move in such a game would be not to play."

"Harry Potter is a bit of a bourgeois fantasy."

"The other problem with saying that people like that are just a product of their time is that not everyone at that time did think like that, and it kinda lets them off the hook. A lot of people thought that slavery was okay, but you know what: The slaves didn’t. And they said so, pretty loudly and often. So if other people thought that slavery was alright, it wasn’t ‘cause they didn’t know, it’s because they chose not to listen to that. They chose not to know."

"Racism is a full-blown normative theory in its own right. Writing it off as just “hate” which needs “love” to combat it can be a little bit reductionist; it can stop us from understanding it."

"Trauma isn’t always like a lightning bolt where you know that you’ve been hit. Sometimes trauma is like poison that someone slips into your food in little doses and you sit down every night and you eat that poison and you don’t realize that it’s building up inside you until suddenly you stop functioning."

"One of the advantages of facing the overwhelming, grief-like nature of climate change, is that once we realize it’s all one problem, we have a lot more allies than we thought. If you campaign for migrants’ freedom of movement, you are fighting climate change. If you support indigenous people’s rights to self-determination, if you support your local antifascists and people fighting police brutality, if you support demilitarization and nuclear disarmament… it’s all one planet."

"I look inside myself and I ask, "Do I feel like a man or a woman?" And the answer is... I feel happy."

"The real meaning of the text, or at least one possible meaning of it, is given by something that is not present in the text itself. Basically, meaning is like jazz. It's about the notes you don't play."

"Ideologies are like arseholes: everyone's got one, we use it every day, but you very rarely look at your own unless something's gone wrong."

"It's always good to squat over the mirror and take a good, hard look at your own ideology sometimes. 'Cause if you don't do the thinking someone else will do the thinking for you."

"If you ask three philosophers how social constructs work, you'll get four theories."

"When you leave the classroom, politics and metaphysics will come at you at the same time. We're not just doing philosophy for the hell of it. We are tinkering with the engine of the world here."

"Transhumanism makes a great conspiracy costume. There's always a lot of tech news so you can rip stuff straight from the headlines about Elon Musk putting computers in monkeys and it'll get clicks. It's also not explicitly religious or racial. If you just come out the gate and say "Jews are planning to exterminate Christian white people!" then a lot of folks will go "Yeah? Allreet, on your bike Adolf!" but if you frame it as 'Elites are planning transhumanism', then at least some people will go, 'Wait, really?' and you can always add the hardcore stuff later once you've got their attention."

"Art isn't a statement or a question. If it was, the artist would just write it down. Art isn't philosophy with pictures. It's art!"

"Masculinity is a subject about which I know more than I should, but less than some of you may think. I studied it for a number of years but I never quite had the natural talent."

"Efforts invested in building new connections bring the most significant results because one person alone is not a warrior."

"To get somewhere, you have to start moving."

"I try to keep learning something new all the time, even if I don’t feel like it."

"I always speak to people the way I’d want them to speak to me: without sarcasm and with complete honesty."

"For me, success is looking back at what’s been done and knowing it was what needed to be done, with no regrets about lost time or effort."