Top 100 Julian Assange Quotes
#2. I'm not a big fan of regulation: anyone who likes freedom of the press can't be.
Julian Assange
#3. I may be a chauvinist pig of some sort, but I'm no rapist.
Julian Assange
#4. It really is my opinion that media in general are so bad that we have to question whether the world wouldn't be better off without them altogether. They are so distortive to how the world actually is that the result is.. we see wars, and we see corrupt governments continue on.
Julian Assange
#5. If we are to produce a more civilized society, a more just society, it has to be based on the truth.
Julian Assange
#6. If journalism is good, it is controversial, by its nature.
Julian Assange
#7. If you look at most definitions, a god is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. In particular, god knows when you are doing something that you shouldn't be doing and whether you are playing according to god's rules.
Julian Assange
#8. If wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth.
Julian Assange
#9. Transparency in government leads to reduced corruption.
Julian Assange
#10. Well, I mean, the real attack on truth is tabloid journalism in the United States.
Julian Assange
#11. Secrecy breeds incompetence because where there is failure, failure is kept secret.
Julian Assange
#12. Media is a big problem around the world, it's powerful and can abuse its power.
Julian Assange
#13. 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.
Julian Assange
#14. If we can only live once, let it be a daring adventure.
Julian Assange
#15. 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.
Julian Assange
#16. The penetration of society by the Internet and the penetration of the Internet by society is the best thing that has ever happened to global human civilisation.
Julian Assange
#17. The corruption in reporting starts very early. It's like the police reporting on the police.
Julian Assange
#18. I mean there's enormous pressures to harmonize freedom of speech legislation and transparency legislation around the world - within the E.U., between China and the United States. Which way is it going to go? It's hard to see.
Julian Assange
#19. And if Bradley Manning really did as he is accused, he is a hero, an example to us all and one of the world's foremost political prisoners.
Julian Assange
#20. 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.
Julian Assange
#21. There is nothing new in this world other than the history that you don't know yet.
Julian Assange
#22. Power is a thing of perception. They don't need to be able to kill you. They just need you to think they are able to kill you
Julian Assange
#23. These megaleaks ... They're an important phenomenon, and they're only going to increase.
Julian Assange
#24. The attack on the truth by war begins long before war starts and continues long after a war ends.
Julian Assange
#25. The greater the power, the more need there is for transparency, because if the power is abused, the result can be so enormous. On the other hand, those people who do not have power, we mustn't reduce their power even more by making them yet more transparent.
Julian Assange
#26. It is impossible to correct abuses unless we know that theyre going on.
Julian Assange
#27. 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.
Julian Assange
#28. Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior.
Julian Assange
#29. We have some material on spying by a major government on the tech industry. Industrial espionage.
Julian Assange
#30. We have to be careful about applying criminal labels to people until we're very sure.
Julian Assange
#31. Wikileaks is a mechanism to maximize the flow of information to maximize the amount of action leading to just reform.
Julian Assange
#32. This generation is burning the mass media to the ground.
Julian Assange
#33. Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.
Julian Assange
#34. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.
Julian Assange
#35. Why is it that govt employees makes the best spouses? Because afterthey come back from work, they are not tired and they already readthe newspapers.
Julian Assange
#36. I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud.
Julian Assange
#37. Society develops a type of self-censorship, with the knowledge that surveillance exists - a self-censorship that is even expressed when people communicate with each other privately.
Julian Assange
#38. One of the hopeful things that I've discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could've stopped it if they had searched deep enough; if they hadn't reprinted government propaganda they could've stopped it.
Julian Assange
#39. Consistency was a matter of style and values-not where you parked your car.
Julian Assange
#40. Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.
Julian Assange
#41. That is vaguely conspiratorial, in a networking sense. We have published their meeting notes.
Julian Assange
#42. Those who are repeatedly passive in the face of injustice soon find their character corroded.
Julian Assange
#43. All over the world, the barriers between what is inside an organisation and outside an organisation are being smoothed out. In the military, the use of contractors means that what is the military and what is not the military is smoothed out.
Julian Assange
#44. We don't have sources who are dissidents on other sources. Should they come forward, that would be a tricky situation for us. But we're presumably acting in such a way that people feel morally compelled to continue our mission, not to screw it up.
Julian Assange
#45. Every time you go to a party and take a picture and post that picture to Facebook, you're being a rat. You're being a narc.
Julian Assange
#46. Cryptography is the essential building block of independence for organisations on the Internet, just like armies are the essential building blocks of states, because otherwise one state just takes over another.
Julian Assange
#47. 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.
Julian Assange
#48. Journalism should be more like science. As far as possible, facts should be verifiable. If journalists want long-term credibility for their profession, they have to go in that direction. Have more respect for readers.
Julian Assange
#49. That's a problem. I mean, like any sort of growing startup organization, we are sort of overwhelmed by our growth. And that means we're getting enormous quantity of whistleblower disclosures of a very high caliber, but don't have enough people to actually process and vet this information.
Julian Assange
#50. The internet has become a political space. I think that is one of the most important developments in the past decade.
Julian Assange
#51. You can't do anything sensible until you know what the situation is that you're in.
Julian Assange
#52. To be alive as a human being is to know, in the same way as it is to have a heart that beats.
Julian Assange
#53. The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.
Julian Assange
#54. I found in investigative journalism it is always best, if you have any language skills, not to admit them.
Julian Assange
#55. I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.
Julian Assange
#56. I fell into a hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism.
Julian Assange
#57. What we know is everything, it is our limit, of what we can be.
Julian Assange
#59. Which country is suffering from too much freedom of speech? Name it, is there one?
Julian Assange
#60. Cryptography is the ultimate form of non-violent direct action.
Julian Assange
#61. Through the confessional system, the Catholic church spied upon the lives of its congregants. While Latin mass excluded most people who could not speak Latin from an understanding of the very system of thought that bound them.
Julian Assange
#62. I am an Australian citizen, and I miss my country a great deal.
Julian Assange
#63. WikiLeaks is really a litmus test for those people who walk the talk in the media. How much will they really follow their protestations to be brave publishers, and how much do they really want to lick the boots of power? Well, you can tell by their engagement with us and what they do.
Julian Assange
#64. We like to engage in a normal publishing effort, which is to act in a responsible manner and make sure the material is not likely to harm anyone, that it is properly investigated by quality news organizations, and by lawyers and human rights groups and so on.
Julian Assange
#65. When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like.
Julian Assange
#66. Big Brother is home. He is installed in the item you just dragged home from the Apple store.
Julian Assange
#67. In the history of Wikileaks, nobody has claimed that the material being put out is not authentic.
Julian Assange
#68. The supply of leaks is very large. It's helpful for us to have more people in this industry. It's protective to us.
Julian Assange
#69. Dont shoot the messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths.
Julian Assange
#70. I had had a lot of experience in bringing the Internet to Australia, and I saw that knowledge in the hands of people achieves reform.
Julian Assange
#71. To keep a person ignorant is to place them in a cage.
Julian Assange
#72. Nothing. There's nothing you can do. As soon as you do something you'll no-longer be average.
Julian Assange
#73. We always expect tremendous criticism. It is my role to be the lightning rod ... to attract the attacks against the organization for our work, and that is a difficult role. On the other hand, I get undue credit.
Julian Assange
#74. As we've gotten more successful, there's a gap between the speed of our publishing pipeline and the speed of our receiving submissions pipeline. Our pipeline of leaks has been increasing exponentially as our profile rises, and our ability to publish is increasing linearly.
Julian Assange
#75. 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 ... I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards.
Julian Assange
#76. So when Putin goes out to buy a Coke, thirty seconds later it is known in Washington DC.
Julian Assange
#77. The aim of Wikileaks is to achieve just reform around the world and do it through the mechanism of transparency.
Julian Assange
#78. Bitcoin actually has the balance and incentives right, and that is why it is starting to take off.
Julian Assange
#79. What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? I give private information on corporations to you for free, and I'm a villain. Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he's Man of the Year.
Julian Assange
#80. Non-conformity is the only real passion worth being ruled by.
Julian Assange
#81. It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on, there's always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy, and we believe that is a good thing to engage in.
Julian Assange
#82. Every law, every constitution, every regulative decision is based upon what people are discussing in their community. It's based upon our sum knowledge of history and the present.
Julian Assange
#83. Don't damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don't change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.
Julian Assange
#84. Vanity in a newspaper man is like perfume on a whore: they use it to fend off a dark whiff of themselves.
Julian Assange
#86. When Enron collapsed, through court processes, thousands and thousands of emails came out that were internal, and it provided a window into how the whole company was managed. It was all the little decisions that supported the flagrant violations.
Julian Assange
#88. Courage is not the absence of fear. Only fools have no fear.
Rather, courage is the intellectual mastery of fear by understanding
the true risks and opportunities of the situation and keeping those
things in balance
Julian Assange
#89. The goal is justice, the method? is transparency. It's important not to confuse the goal and the method.
Julian Assange
#90. As a European Union member state, as a country committed throughout all its history to the fight for the values that I have made my own, as the fifth world power, as a country that has marked my life and European Union houses part of European Union, France can act if it wishes to do so.
Julian Assange
#91. I enjoy crushing bastards. So it is enjoyable work.
Julian Assange
#92. Every War in the past 50 Years is a Result of Media Lies
Julian Assange
#93. You can't publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism.
Julian Assange
#94. My family has had to move and change their name and have been subject to threats from right wing blogs calling for my son, for example, to be killed to get at me.
Julian Assange
#95. I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time.
Julian Assange
#96. Reality is an aspect of property. It must be seized. And investigative journalism is the noble art of seizing reality back from the powerful.
Julian Assange
#97. It is getting to the point where the mark of international distinction and service to humanity is no longer the Nobel Peace Price, but an espionage indictment from the US Department of Justice.
Julian Assange
#98. I always believed that WikiLeaks as a concept would perform a global role, and to some degree it was clear that it was doing that as far back as 2007 when it changed the result of the Kenyan general election.
Julian Assange
#99. Opponents past and present have the same essential weakness about them: first they want to use you, then they want to be you, then they want to snuff you out.
Julian Assange
#100. Smears don't have much staying power on their own because they deviate from the foundations of reality (what actually happened). They require constant energy from our opponents to keep going. The truth has a habit of reasserting itself.
Julian Assange
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