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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Richard Stallman Quotes

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

– Richard Stallman

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

– Richard Stallman

The desire to be rewarded for one’s creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.

– Richard Stallman

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

– Richard Stallman

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.

– Richard Stallman

I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there’s a sucker born every minute.

– Richard Stallman

There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one’s income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive.

– Richard Stallman

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

– Richard Stallman

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

– Richard Stallman

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

– Richard Stallman

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.

– Richard Stallman

If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenceless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

– Richard Stallman

The reason that a good citizen does not use such destructive means to become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become poorer from the mutual destructiveness.

– Richard Stallman

Control over the use of one’s ideas really constitutes control over other people’s lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.

– Richard Stallman

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

– Richard Stallman

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

– Richard Stallman

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.

– Richard Stallman

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control.

– Richard Stallman

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.

– Richard Stallman

A smartphone is a computer – it’s not built using a computer – the job it does is the job of being a computer. So, everything we say about computers, that the software you run should be free – you should insist on that – applies to smart phones just the same. And likewise to those tablets.

– Richard Stallman

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.

– Richard Stallman

Software patents are dangerous to software developers because they impose monopolies on software ideas.

– Richard Stallman

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.

– Richard Stallman

The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion.

– Richard Stallman

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.

– Richard Stallman

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.

– Richard Stallman