Top 90 Lawrence Lessig Quotes
#1. I'm focused on solving the problem that would make it plausible for gov't to get back to solving real problems.
Lawrence Lessig
#2. In a time of polarized politics there's one thing that more than ninety percent of Americans agree on, that our government is broken, and broken because of the money in politics.
Lawrence Lessig
#3. The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration, but instead from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the change in copyright, produces.
Lawrence Lessig
#4. I think if the copyright regime focuses on the people we are supposed to be helping, the artists and creators, and builds a system that gives them the freedom to choose and to protect and to be rewarded for their creativity, then we will have the right focus.
Lawrence Lessig
#5. In the 1970s, 3 percent of retiring members became lobbyists. Thirty years later, that number has increased by an order of magnitude. Between 1998 and 2004, more than 50 percent of senators and 42 percent of House members made that career transition.
Lawrence Lessig
#6. One great feature of modern society is the institutionalized respect we give to processes designed to destroy the past.
Lawrence Lessig
#7. I'm pushing for citizen equality not because of some moral idea, but because this is the essential way to crack the corruption that now makes it so Washington can't work.
Lawrence Lessig
#8. As we've seen, our constitutional system requires limits on copyright as a way to assure that copyright holders do not too heavily influence the development and distribution of our culture.
Lawrence Lessig
#9. If the law imposed the death penalty for parking tickets, we'd not only have fewer parking tickets, we'd also have much
less driving.
Lawrence Lessig
#10. Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.
Lawrence Lessig
#11. In these times, the hardest task for social or political activists is to find a way to get people to wonder again about what we all believe is true. The challenge is to sow doubt.
Lawrence Lessig
#12. Companies will often use the legal system to scare people away from attacking them. But we all should be free to make critical statements about anybody, unless those statements are malicious.
Lawrence Lessig
#13. For however much the state may gain by not having to fund roads on its own, society would lose in aggregate if the open commons of transportation were lost.
Lawrence Lessig
#16. A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense.
Lawrence Lessig
#17. Legislation needs a better reason than that lawyers like it, and that America does it.
Lawrence Lessig
#18. This does not mean that every copyright must prove its value initially. That would be a far too cumbersome system of control. But it does mean that every system or category of copyright or patent should prove its worth.
Lawrence Lessig
#19. The question is: Which means best advances the regulator's goal, subject to the constraints (whether normative or material) that the regulator must recognize? My
Lawrence Lessig
#20. [I]t kind of terrified me to imagine myself spending the rest of my life tinkering on the margins of the small arguments.
Lawrence Lessig
#21. Monopoly controls have been the exception in free societies; they have been the rule in closed societies.
Lawrence Lessig
#22. I advocate for protecting the liberty of the net, and securing privacy. I argue against people who believe both are somehow given automatically. They're not.
Lawrence Lessig
#23. If there were two candidates, a Democrat and a Republican, who each committed to the same kind of fundamental reform, then the election would be an election between the vice presidential candidates. It'd be just like the regular election, except it would be one step down.
Lawrence Lessig
#24. We are on the cusp of this time where I can say, "I speak as a citizen of the world" without others saying, God, what a nut.
Lawrence Lessig
#25. There is still the illusion that if we could declare corporations are not people or that money is not speech, all would be solved. Regardless of the good in those ideas, it wouldn't.
Lawrence Lessig
#26. If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit.
Lawrence Lessig
#27. While appropriation art is critical to art, it's an ambiguous art form in the world of the Supreme Court.
Lawrence Lessig
#28. If you are explaining, you're losing. It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem.
Lawrence Lessig
#29. While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible.
Lawrence Lessig
#30. Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property.
Lawrence Lessig
#31. If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before because there are no formalities.
Lawrence Lessig
#32. Technology means you can now do amazing things easily; but you couldn't easily do them legally.
Lawrence Lessig
#33. When you think about a presidential candidate spending all of his or her time talking to that tiny, tiny fraction of us who have the capacity to fund political elections, it's obvious why the perspective of government is skewed relative to what most Americans care about.
Lawrence Lessig
#34. Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device.
Lawrence Lessig
#35. A world where Congressmen spend 30 to 70 percent of their time raising money from a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1% is a world where that tiny, tiny fraction has enormous power. And it's that inequality in political power that enables this corrupted system to happen.
Lawrence Lessig
#36. Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal.
Lawrence Lessig
#37. We have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying.
Lawrence Lessig
#38. All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations.
Lawrence Lessig
#39. Some may not like the Constitution's requirements, but that doesn't make the Constitution a pirate's charter.
Lawrence Lessig
#40. And with a practice of writing comes a certain important integrity. A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing in writing why A leads to B.
Lawrence Lessig
#41. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom.
Lawrence Lessig
#42. Show me why your regulation of culture is needed. Show me how it does good. And until you can show me both, keep your lawyers away.
Lawrence Lessig
#43. Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen - the Internet - has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology.
Lawrence Lessig
#44. The current term of protection for software is the life of an author plus 70 years, or, if it's work-for-hire, a total of 95 years. This is a bastardization of the Constitution's requirement that copyright be for "limited times."
Lawrence Lessig
#45. So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in culture that we don't even question when the control of that property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture democratically.
Lawrence Lessig
#46. [Congress] and their cronies secure more than one hundred billion dollars in corporate welfare
Lawrence Lessig
#47. By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited.
Lawrence Lessig
#48. The real harm of term extension comes not from these famous works. The real harm is to the works that are not famous, not commercially exploited, and no longer available as a result.
Lawrence Lessig
#50. Believing we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution lives. These changes will end the revolution.
Lawrence Lessig
#51. Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law.
Lawrence Lessig
#52. Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables.
Lawrence Lessig
#53. We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us.
Lawrence Lessig
#54. While control is needed, and perfectly warranted, our bias should be clear up front: Monopolies are not justified by theory; they should be permitted only when justified by facts. If there is no solid basis for extending a certain monopoly protection, then we should not extend that protection.
Lawrence Lessig
#55. You and I both know that as long as our representatives are held hostage to their funders - and their funders are not all of us - our system will not work
Lawrence Lessig
#56. When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.
Lawrence Lessig
#57. Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn't reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator.
Lawrence Lessig
#58. Permission from the government is an expensive commodity. New ideas rarely have this kind of support. Old ideas often have deep legislative connections to defend them against the new.
Lawrence Lessig
#59. We established a regime that left creativity unregulated. Now it was unregulated because copyright law only covered "printing." Copyright law did not control derivative work. And copyright law granted this protection for the limited time of 14 years.
Lawrence Lessig
#60. My claim is that we should focus on the values of liberty ... If there is not government to insist on those values, then who? ... The single unifying force should be that we govern ourselves.
Lawrence Lessig
#61. I don't support direct democracy because I want a life, and that means I want to select people who work for me who do that sort of work for me.
Lawrence Lessig
#62. It is said that those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it. That's not quite correct. We all forget history. The key is whether we have a way to go back to rediscover what we forget. More directly, the key is whether an objective past can keep us honest.
Lawrence Lessig
#63. A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid.
Lawrence Lessig
#64. Change the way we fund campaigns. Until we do, Wall Street will always be able to blackmail the Dems and GOP to giving them what Wall Street wants.
Lawrence Lessig
#65. The war against illegal file-sharing is like the church's age-old war against masturbation. It's a war you just can't win.
Lawrence Lessig
#66. Politics is that rare sport where the amateur contest is actually more interesting than the professional.
Lawrence Lessig
#67. Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before.
Lawrence Lessig
#68. [Conservatives] go to church, they do lots of things for free for each other. They hold potluck dinners ... They serve food to poor people. They share, they give, they give away for free. It's the very same people leading Wall Street firms who, on Sundays, show up and share.
Lawrence Lessig
#69. There is a culture among academics to be obscure. If you're too clear, you can't be saying anything interesting. The issue isn't word length. The issue is a commitment to speaking in a way an audience can understand.
Lawrence Lessig
#70. Code plus law is combining to reduce rights consumers used to have.
Lawrence Lessig
#72. Before the monopoly should be permitted, there must be reason to believe it will do some good - for society, and not just for monopoly holders.
Lawrence Lessig
#73. Why should it be that just when technology is
most encouraging of creativity, the law should be most restrictive?
Lawrence Lessig
#74. Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process.
Lawrence Lessig
#75. Lawyers rarely test their power, or the power they promote, against this simple pragmatic question: "Will it do good?" When challenged about the expanding reach of the law, the lawyer answers, "Why not?
Lawrence Lessig
#76. As I've indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.
Lawrence Lessig
#77. Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt.
Lawrence Lessig
#78. I don't care if the Koch brothers or Soros spend their money to promote one candidate or another. I care about members of Congress spending 30%-70% of their time raising money from .05% of us. Change the way we fund elections and you change the corruption.
Lawrence Lessig
#79. My work about corruption is to get people to see it less as a moral issue (right/wrong) and more as an economic issue (economies of influence and their effect).
Lawrence Lessig
#80. It's fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme.
Lawrence Lessig
#81. Creativity is enhanced by less-than-perfect control over what content is on the network.
Lawrence Lessig
#82. I am a big supporter of experiments to complement representative gov't with randomly selected representative bodies of citizens, sure. I think most Americans would be surprised to learn just how much better we are at gov't than our gov't.
Lawrence Lessig
#83. All of the great Disney works took works that were in the public domain and remixed them.
Lawrence Lessig
#84. A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now.
Lawrence Lessig
#85. Writing is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound.
Lawrence Lessig
#86. Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again.
Lawrence Lessig
#87. I'm all for experimenting with sortition - randomly selected representative bodies of citizens. But I don't favor direct democracy. We're busy. We have lives. There is reddit. Who has time to work out the right answer to the thousand policy choices a gov't must make all the time?
Lawrence Lessig
#88. One theme of what I've been writing has been to get people to understand that "apolitical" means "you lose." It doesn't mean you live a utopian life free of politicians' influence. The destruction of the public domain is the clearest example, but it will only be the first.
Lawrence Lessig
#89. I spend as little time with lawmakers as possible. Many are great. And more than you expect want real change. But they're not going to do anything till we, the outsiders, force them to adopt it.
Lawrence Lessig
#90. Free culture depends upon vibrant competition. Yet the effect of the law today is to stifle just this kind of competition. The effect is to produce an over-regulated culture, just as the effect of too much control in the market is to produce an over-regulated-regulated market.
Lawrence Lessig
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