Richard Stallman Quotes

Whether gods exist or not, there is no way to get absolute certainty about ethics. Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can.

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.

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.

Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria.

The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way.

I did write some code in Java once, but that was the island in Indonesia.

Sharing knowledge is the most fundamental act of friendship. Because it is a way you can give something without loosing something.

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

Sharing is good, and with digital technology, sharing is easy.

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.

Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.

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.

Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community. So it's free as in freedom.

It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".

Android is very different from the GNU/Linux operating system because it contains very little of GNU. Indeed, just about the only component in common between Android and GNU/Linux is Linux, the kernel.

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.

Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking.

I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.

The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't appreciate what a powerful language is. Once you learn Lisp you will see what is missing in most other languages.

People get the government their behavior deserves. People deserve better than that.

If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not enough - you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal.

No person, no idea, and no religion deserves to be illegal to insult, not even the Church of Emacs.

People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.

Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Alliance.

I've read that male dolphins try to have sex with humans, and female apes solicit sex from humans. What is wrong with giving them what they want, if that's what turns you on, or even just to gratify them?

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

Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.

Idiots can be defeated but they never admit it.

Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.

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.

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.

The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do.

All governments should be pressured to correct their abuses of human rights.

Now that corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users.

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.

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.

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

There is no system but GNU and Linux is one of it's kernels

I have met bright students in computer science who have never seen the source code of a large program. They may be good at writing small programs, but they can't begin to learn the different skills of writing large ones if they can't see how others have done it.

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

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.

For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon 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.

Android is a major step towards an ethical, user-controlled, free-software portable phone, but there is a long way to go.

I'm always happy when I'm protesting.

Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. "Don't bother us with politics," respond those who don't want to learn.

Globalizing a bad thing makes it worse. But globalizing a good thing is usually good.

Anything that prevents you from being friendly, a good neighbour, is a terror tactic.

Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results.

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.

Laws that oppress people have no moral authority.