Richard Stallman Quotes
-
Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can. Injustice is happening now; suffering is happening now. We have choices to make now. To insist on absolute certainty before starting to apply ethics to life decisions is a way of choosing to be amoral.
→ -
The GNU GPL was not designed to be "open source".
→ -
Anything that prevents you from being friendly, a good neighbour, is a terror tactic.
→ -
I'm the last survivor of a dead culture. And I don't really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead.
→ -
Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results.
→ -
If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be very very glad… DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If you don't know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally scarred and spend many decades feeling frightened and unhappy. If you buy a captured wild parrot, you will promote a cruel and devastating practice, and the parrot will be emotionally scarred before you get it. Meeting that sad animal is not an agreeable surprise.
→ -
Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.
→ -
Our mailing lists (and their repeater newsgroups) are only for the purpose of promoting proprietary software.
→ -
Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.
→ -
People said I should accept the world. Bullshit! I don't accept the world.
→ -
GNU, which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it.
→ -
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.
→ -
By the way, I hope you all know about the worldwide boycott of Coca Cola company for things like murdering union organizers in Colombia. See the site killercoke.org.
→ -
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.
→ -
You can use any editor you want, but remember that vi vi vi is the text editor of the beast.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
You know, if you were *really* going to starve, you'd be justified in writing proprietary software.
→ -
EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight.
→ -
If ebooks mean that readers' freedom must either increase or decrease, we must demand the increase.
→ -
One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control.
→ -
Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is 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'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage.
→ -
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.
→ -
The desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.
→ -
I'm always happy when I'm protesting.
→ -
Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users dont have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware.
→ -
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.
→ -
The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.
→
Related Authors
-
Steve Jobs Entrepreneur -
Miguel de Icaza Programmer -
Bill Gates Investor -
Ken Thompson Computer Designer -
Steve Wozniak Inventor -
Tim Berners-Lee Computer Scientist -
Lawrence Lessig Political activist -
Donald Knuth Computer Scientist -
Dennis Ritchie Computer Scientist -
Andrew S. Tanenbaum Computer Scientist -
Larry Wall Programmer -
Kevin Mitnick Consultant -
Bjarne Stroustrup Scientist -
Brian Kernighan Computer Scientist -
Linus Torvalds Software Engineer -
Grace Hopper Computer Scientist -
James Gosling Computer Scientist -
Mark Shuttleworth Entrepreneur -
Eric S. Raymond Programmer -
Eben Moglen Law professor