 Control over the use of one's ideas really constitutes control over other people's lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult. |
| Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. 'Don't bother us with politics', respond those who don't want to learn. |
| The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way. |
| There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive. |
| All governments should be pressured to correct their abuses of human rights. |
| If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not enough - you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal. |
| Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria. |
| The desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity. |
| Anything that prevents you from being friendly, a good neighbour, is a terror tactic. |
| If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs. |
| The reason that a good citizen does not use such destructive means to become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become poorer from the mutual destructiveness. |
| Whether gods exist or not, there is no way to get absolute certainty about ethics. Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can. |
| People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking. |
| The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part. |
| I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place. |
