To me the key thing is getting it right. And if a person's really smart and they're doing fantastic work I don't care if they're a high school kid or a Harvard professor, it's the work that matters.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

I'm a big advocate of freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of thought.

My original concept was to provide a free encyclopedia for every single person in the world.

The goal is to give people a free encyclopedia to every person in the world, in their own language. Not just in a 'free beer' kind of way, but also in the free speech kind of way.

The real struggle is not between the right and the left but between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks.

Most people assume the fights are going to be the left versus the right, but it always is the reasonable versus the jerks.

We are growing from a cheerful small town where everyone waves off their front porch to the subway of New York City where everyone rushes by. How do you preserve the culture that has worked so well?

Love. It isn't very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it's a very very important part of what holds our project together.

Everybody tells jokes, but we still need comedians.

A lot of people who work on open-source software don't mind making money elsewhere. They aren't anticommercial.

He is always doing something--the very best thing, the thing we ourselves would certainly choose if we knew the end from the beginning. He is at work to bring us to our full glory.

Equality cannot be imagined outside of tyranny.

We're always one breath away from something, living or dying, sometimes it just can't be helped.

Individual and national rights to wealth rest on the basis of civil and international law, or at least of custom that has the force of law.

There is but one pleasure in life equal to that of being called on to make an after-dinner speech, and that is not being called on to make one.

"Terrorism" is a metaphor, it's an abstract noun. It's like having a war on dandruff. It's something from advertising, it's meaningless.

If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.

I'm no interior decorator, but just I have a feeling that plastic plants in the bathroom... probably not a good idea.

All of my own impulses to balance and move seemed to conflict with those of the guards, and I was jerked and jostled down the portico, just as graceful as a sick cat.

You know you are getting old when everything either dries up or leaks.