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Richard Stallman

125 quotes

• “I have not seen anyone assume that all the citizens of New York are guilty of murder, violence, robbery, perjury, or writing proprietary software.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: My Doom and You (2004)

• “Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism; it was set up by that famous communist agent, the US Department of Defense.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Bill Gates and other communists ", op-ed at ZDNet (February 15, 2005)

• “People said I should accept the world. Bullshit! I don't accept the world.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Keynote address at the New York Linux Bazaar; quoted on bolug (April 4, 2005)

• “It doesn't take special talents to reproduce — even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really something to be proud of. It helps more people, too.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: In response to the news that a colleague would not have as much time to devote to Emacs since the birth of his daughter, in Gmane (April 27, 2005)

• “It is funny, but I'm disappointed that it accentuates the shallow.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Remarks on "Kernel mentor", an Everybody loves Eric Raymond internet cartoon (May 17, 2005) in which he is depicted stating "GNU's not understood by everyone, Linus.

• “I don't have a problem with someone using their talents to become successful, I just don't think the highest calling is success. Things like freedom and the expansion of knowledge are beyond success, beyond the personal. Personal success is not wrong, but it is limited in importance, and once you have enough of it it is a shame to keep striving for that, instead of for truth, beauty, or justice.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Free Software as a Social Movement" on Znet (December 18, 2005)

• “The part of these immigration bills that I hate most is the requirement for new forms of identification and surveillance of US citizens. I gather this is supported by nearly everyone in Congress. Orwellian surveillance is not controversial in the US, where "Land of the Free" has been replaced with "Let me see your papers." When the US adopted a requirement for US citizens to prove their citizenship in order to get a job, I vowed I would never do so. I will never again be an employee in the US.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Border Patrol" (May 26, 2006)

• “Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization. I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Dutch paedophiles form political party" (5 June 2006)

• “You can use any editor you want, but remember that vi vi vi is the text editor of the beast.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: HOPE Speech (2006)

• “My favorite programming languages are Lisp and C. However, since around 1992 I have worked mainly on free software activism, which means I am too busy to do much programming. Around 2008 I stopped doing programming projects.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: How I do my computing (2006)

• “The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't know what it means for a programming language to be powerful and elegant. Once you learn Lisp, you will understand what is lacking in most other languages. When you start a Lisp system, it enters a read-eval-print loop. Most other languages have nothing comparable to read, nothing comparable to eval, and nothing comparable to print. What gaping deficiencies!”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: How I do my computing (2006)

• “No person, no idea, and no religion deserves to be illegal to insult, not even the Church of Emacs — and certainly not Islam.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On report of Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil who was sentenced to four years in prison for insulting Islam and Hosni Mubarak, in "Illegal to insult" (March 1, 2007)

• “To have the choice between proprietary software packages, is being able to choose your master. Freedom means not having a master. And in the area of computing, freedom means not using proprietary software.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Free Software and Beyond: Human Rights in the Use of Software", address at Goeteborg, Sweden (May 16, 2007)

• “Laws that oppress people have no moral authority.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Human Rights in the Use of Software and Other Published Works (May 16, 2007)

• “A lot of people think of a computer as just a tool, and they don't ask themselves who decides what they can do with the tool and what they can't do with the tool.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview with Will Backman for bsdtalk (12 October 2007)

• “The Adobe flash plug-in is non-free software, and people should not install it, or suggest installing it, or even tell people it exists.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On the OpenBSD mailing list (December 14, 2007)

• “For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have no net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a daemon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: OpenBSD mailing list (December 15, 2007)

• “Four species of penguins that breed in Antartica [sic] are endangered by global warming. Even I, the only man in the world who can get angry from looking at a picture of a penguin, find this bad news.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Penguins" (December 16, 2007)

• “We need to teach people to refuse to install non-free plug-ins; we need to teach people to care more about their long-term interest of freedom than their immediate desire to view a particular site.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview with Richard Stallman: Four Essential Freedoms" Roy Schestowitz, in IT Management (December 19, 2007)

• “Freedom and community are important. Gratis software is not worth such an effort, because price is usually not an ethical issue. Paying isn’t wrong, and being paid isn’t wrong. Trampling other people’s freedom and community is wrong, so the free software movement aims to put an end to it, at least in the area of software.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview with Richard M. Stallman" in Free Software Magazine (January 23, 2008)

• “The GNU GPL was not designed to be "open source". I wrote it for the w:free software movement, and its purpose is to ensure every user of every version of the program gets the essential freedoms. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html for more explanation of the difference between free software and open source.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Re: GPL version 4" on the NetBSD mailing list (July 17, 2008)

• “It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign. ... Somebody is saying this is inevitable—and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control. It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman", in The Guardian (29 September 2008)

• “There are tremendous actual differences in values. Some value systems, such as the ones that motivate "honor killings", deserve to be morally condemned and rejected. But there are many other variations in values within the bounds of decency.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Zeitgeist Movement" (2009)

• “Snow is so beautiful, it doesn't have to be useful.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Parliament Hill Speech, Ottawa, Canada, (June 2, 2009)

• “It's clear that other problems such as religious fundamentalism, overpopulation, damage to the environment, and the domination of business over government, science, thought, and society, are much bigger than non-free software. But many other people are already working on them, and I don't have any great aptitude or ideas for how to address them. So it seems best for me to keep working on the issue of free software. Besides, free software does counter one aspect of business domination of society.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “If in my lifetime the problem of non-free software is solved, I could perhaps relax and write software again. But I might instead try to help deal with the world's larger problems. Standing up to an evil system is exhilarating, and now I have a taste for it.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I never imagined that the Free Software Movement would spawn a watered-down alternative, the Open Source Movement, which would become so well-known that people would ask me questions about "open source" thinking that I work under that banner.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Calling the whole system "Linux" leads people to think that the system's development was started in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. That is what most users seem to think. The occasional few users that do know about the GNU Project often think we played a secondary role — for example, they say to me, 'Of course I know about GNU — GNU developed some tools that are part of Linux'.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I see nothing unethical in the job it does. Why shouldn't you send a copy of some music to a friend?”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The War on Drugs has continued for some 20 years, and we see little prospect of peace, despite the fact that it has totally failed and given the US an imprisonment rate almost equal to Russia. I fear that the War on Copying could go on for decades as well. To end it, we will need to rethink the copyright system, based on the Constitution's view that it is meant to benefit the public, not the copyright owners. Today, one of the benefits the public wants is the use of computers to share copies.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Sometimes you can justify doing something that hurts other people by saying otherwise something worse is going to happen to me. You know, if you were *really* going to starve, you'd be justified in writing proprietary software.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I've always lived cheaply. I live like a student, basically. And I like that, because it means that money is not telling me what to do. I can do what I think is important for me to do. It freed me to do what seemed worth doing. So make a real effort to avoid getting sucked into all the expensive lifestyle habits of typical Americans. Because if you do that, then people with the money will dictate what you do with your life. You won't be able to do what's really important to you.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “...when I do this, some people think that it's because I want my ego to be fed, right? Of course, I'm not saying — I'm not asking you to call it "Stallmanix," right?”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “We want to replace proprietary software, with its unjust social system with Free Software and its ethical social system. And so we develop free replacements for proprietary software, and other free programs whenever we get an idea, so that the world can live in freedom. The part that uses computers, at least, in that one area of life. Because winning and maintaining freedom in general is a much bigger, much broader and harder activity, but this is one part of it.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “C++ is a badly designed and ugly language. It would be a shame to use it in Emacs.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Re: Efforts to attract more users?" emacs-devel (July 12, 2010)

• “It is unfortunate that he still has nonfree software in his computer. He needs to defenestrate it (which means, either throw Windows out of the computer or throw the computer out of the window).”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On hearing someone owns a GNU+Linux/Windows dual boot machine, quoted in "Richard Stallman’s Opinion On Dual Booting – “Defenestrate It”" in digitizor (May 31, 2011)

• “Nobody deserves to have to die — not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Richard Stallman's dissenting view on Steve Jobs in The Los Angeles Times (October 8, 2011)

• “Why is it bad to use an unauthorized copy of a proprietary program? Because it's proprietary! So an unauthorized copy is almost as nasty as an authorized copy of the same program. They are both nasty because they are proprietary. The users don't have control over them. If they pay developer – that makes it worse, because they are rewarding this delinquency. That's why the authorized copy is worse. But they are both bad because they are both proprietary software. If you want freedom, you have to get rid of them both, because they both control you.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Richard Stallman: Facebook IS Mass Surveillance", RT (December 2, 2011)

• “While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance in technology is an opening for them to further restrict its users.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Stallman's Law (2012)

• “There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children. Granted, children may not dare say no to an older relative, or may not realize they could say no; in that case, even if they do not overtly object, the relationship may still feel imposed to them. That's not willing participation, it's imposed participation, a different issue.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Pedophilia" (January 4, 2013)

• “I didn't single out Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft had nothing to do with it in the beginning. Microsoft in 1983 made a toy operating system for toy computers, and I hardly paid any attention to it.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Corporations don't have to be decent. Real persons, if they do something that's lawful but nasty you'll say 'you are a jerk, you are acting like a jerk, stop it!". But we are not supposed to ever say that to these phony people. We are supposed to say 'oh well, it's lawful so we'll just have to suffer it'.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Programming is programming. If you get good at programming, it doesn't matter which language you learned it in, because you'll be able to do programming in any language. The hard part of programming is the same regardless of the language. And if you have a talent for that, and you learned it here, you can take it over there. Oh, one thing: if you want to get a picture of a programming at its most powerful, you should learn Lisp or Scheme because they are more elegant and powerful than other languages.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: You broke the Internet. We're making ourselves a GNU one." (August 2013) (around 02:16)

• “If the users don't control the program, the program controls the users. With proprietary software, there is always some entity, the "owner" of the program, that controls the program—and through it, exercises power over its users. A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Free Software Is Even More Important Now (September 2013)

• “Friends share music with each other, they don't allow themselves to be divided by a system that says that nobody is supposed to have copies.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: LibrePlanet Keynote Speech (2015) @20:45

• “I have to explain that I'm not an anarchist – I have a pro-state gland.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Answer to a question during his keynote speech at Libre Planet 2015. "Stallman joins the Internet, talks net neutrality, patents and more" at NetworkWorld (March 23, 2015)

• “Using GPL is encroaching on our rights to encroach on yours.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Poem on opponents of the GPL's sharing requirements, as quoted in "Stallman joins the Internet, talks net neutrality, patents and more" at NetworkWorld (March 23, 2015)

• “Any time I connect to a website other than Wikipedia, it's through Tor.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: In a video interview around 38:20 (published on February 22, 2016)

• “Friend don't let companies spy on friends.”

  Richard Stallman (born 1953) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: LibrePlanet 2019

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