Top 100 Assange Quotes
#1. In a film muddied by fictional detail, the new Spielberg production 'Fifth Estate's portrayal of the 'Guardian's work with Wikileaks is accurate in describing the running dispute between journalists who wanted to redact documents to make them safe and Julian Assange, who wanted no such restraint.
Nick Davies
#2. Julian Assange is self-consciously an individual. He thinks in his own way, primarily as a physicist, having studied pure maths and physics at university in Australia where he grew up.
Nick Davies
#3. We are all Julian Assange. Serious reporters discuss classified information every day - go to any Washington or New York dinner party where real journalists are present, and you will hear discussion of leaked or classified information. That is journalists' job in a free society.
Naomi Wolf
#4. I wonder if 50 years from now we'll look back, and maybe Julian Assange will be the hero and J. Edgar Hoover will be the enemy of the state.
Rick Smolan
#5. In the physical world, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a wanted man.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#6. I feel that Julian Assange came to be both paranoid and self-regarding in ways that ultimately undermined his own mission. And so, the transparency radical became a secret-keeper instead of a secret-leaker. And that, I think, is a big problem.
Alex Gibney
#7. In the United States, whatever you may think of Julian Assange, even people who are not necessarily big fans of his are very concerned about the way in which the United States government and some companies have handled Wikileaks.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#8. They antagonised Julian Assange over six lines from OT VII and he ended up releasing 612 pages' worth of all the OT levels. In
Steve Cannane
#9. 'Sir' Richard Branson may be the Julian Assange of British business, in that both believe the world revolves around them. Hence Branson's decision to set up an air service between Manchester and London, above the route of the train line that's been taken from him.
Simon Hoggart
#10. The values of WikiLeaks have been completely overshadowed by Julian Assange.
Heather Brooke
#11. In many ways, I'm a big admirer still of Julian Assange. He had balls to do what he did and his motivations in terms of holding the powerful to account are tremendously inspiring to me.
Alex Gibney
#12. Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has on several occasions talked about transparency as an absolute principle. I don't personally believe that.
Bill Keller
#14. EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.
Daniel Ellsberg
#15. WikiLeaks is a service to the population. Assange should get an award for - presidential medal of honor.
Noam Chomsky
#16. The fact is that when it comes to judgment as to what should be secret and what should not be secret, Julian Assange's judgment has been pretty good so far.
Daniel Ellsberg
#17. Federal prosecutors want to indict Julian Assange for making public a great many classified documents.
Barton Gellman
#18. Snowden's itinerary does, however, seem to bear the fingerprints of Julian Assange. Assange was often quick to criticise the US and other western nations when they abused human rights. But he was reluctant to speak out against governments that supported his personal efforts to avoid extradition.
Luke Harding
#19. Julian Assange is certainly no hero. The man behind WikiLeaks issued threats as if he were Dr. No bent on ending civilization as we know it. We will find him, lock him up, and throw away the key. But give the man credit; for a week the truth was laid bare.
Martin Cruz Smith
#20. Assange is not a 'journalist' any more than the 'editor' of al-Qaeda's new English-language magazine 'Inspire' is a 'journalist.' He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.
Sarah Palin
#21. I can't wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange.
Michael Grunwald
#23. I'm not a big fan of regulation: anyone who likes freedom of the press can't be.
Julian Assange
#24. I may be a chauvinist pig of some sort, but I'm no rapist.
Julian Assange
#25. 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
#26. This movement is not about the destruction of law, but the construction of law.
Julian Assange
#27. If we are to produce a more civilized society, a more just society, it has to be based on the truth.
Julian Assange
#28. Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented,
Julian Assange
#29. If journalism is good, it is controversial, by its nature.
Julian Assange
#30. 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
#31. If wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth.
Julian Assange
#32. Transparency in government leads to reduced corruption.
Julian Assange
#33. Well, I mean, the real attack on truth is tabloid journalism in the United States.
Julian Assange
#34. Secrecy breeds incompetence because where there is failure, failure is kept secret.
Julian Assange
#35. Media is a big problem around the world, it's powerful and can abuse its power.
Julian Assange
#36. Censorship is always 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.
Julian Assange
#37. 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
#38. If we can only live once, let it be a daring adventure.
Julian Assange
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. The only way to keep a secret is to never have one.
Julian Assange
#42. The corruption in reporting starts very early. It's like the police reporting on the police.
Julian Assange
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes.
Julian Assange
#47. There is nothing new in this world other than the history that you don't know yet.
Julian Assange
#48. 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
#49. These megaleaks ... They're an important phenomenon, and they're only going to increase.
Julian Assange
#50. The attack on the truth by war begins long before war starts and continues long after a war ends.
Julian Assange
#51. 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
#52. It is impossible to correct abuses unless we know that theyre going on.
Julian Assange
#53. 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
#54. Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior.
Julian Assange
#55. We have some material on spying by a major government on the tech industry. Industrial espionage.
Julian Assange
#56. We have to be careful about applying criminal labels to people until we're very sure.
Julian Assange
#57. Wikileaks is a mechanism to maximize the flow of information to maximize the amount of action leading to just reform.
Julian Assange
#58. This generation is burning the mass media to the ground.
Julian Assange
#59. Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.
Julian Assange
#60. Although I still write, research and investigate, my role is primarily that of a publisher and editor-in-chief who organises and directs other journalists.
Julian Assange
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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.
Julian Assange
#65. WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical.
Julian Assange
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Consistency was a matter of style and values-not where you parked your car.
Julian Assange
#69. Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.
Julian Assange
#70. That is vaguely conspiratorial, in a networking sense. We have published their meeting notes.
Julian Assange
#71. Those who are repeatedly passive in the face of injustice soon find their character corroded.
Julian Assange
#72. Google's colourful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under six billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a year - an opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history.
Julian Assange
#73. Cablegate is 3,000 volumes of material. It is the greatest intellectual treasure to have entered into the public record in modern times.
Julian Assange
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. The internet has become a political space. I think that is one of the most important developments in the past decade.
Julian Assange
#82. You can't do anything sensible until you know what the situation is that you're in.
Julian Assange
#83. Every time we witness an act that we feel to be unjust and do not act, we become a party to injustice.
Julian Assange
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. I found in investigative journalism it is always best, if you have any language skills, not to admit them.
Julian Assange
#87. 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
#88. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere.
Julian Assange
#89. I fell into a hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism.
Julian Assange
#90. What we know is everything, it is our limit, of what we can be.
Julian Assange
#93. Which country is suffering from too much freedom of speech? Name it, is there one?
Julian Assange
#94. Cryptography is the ultimate form of non-violent direct action.
Julian Assange
#95. 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
#96. I am an Australian citizen, and I miss my country a great deal.
Julian Assange
#97. 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.
Julian Assange
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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