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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Idiots can be defeated but they never admit it.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I'm always happy when I'm protesting.

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

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

Laws that oppress people have no moral authority.

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

In the free/libre software movement, we develop software that respects users' freedom, so we and you can escape from software that doesn't.

Prior art is as effective as US soldiers in Iraq: They control the ground they stand on, and nothing more. I used to say Vietnam, but, well, you know.

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

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

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

In terms of effect on the world, it's very good that I've lived. And so I guess, if I could go back in time and prevent my birth, I wouldn't do it. But I sure wish I hadn't had so much pain.

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 have not seen anyone assume that all the citizens of New York are guilty of murder, violence, robbery, perjury, or writing proprietary software.

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.

Because I don't believe that it's really desirable to have security on a computer, I shouldn't be willing to help uphold the security regime.

Programming is not a science. Programming is a craft.

Our mailing lists (and their repeater newsgroups) are only for the purpose of promoting proprietary software.

Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer'.

A commune is where people join together to share their lack of wealth.

If ebooks mean that readers' freedom must either increase or decrease, we must demand the increase.

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 GNU GPL was not designed to be "open source".