Best Ever Quotes On Medai Shfbjdsjhbwwhkfbnwwfdfbfbi
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wrap;">The Electronic Frontier Foundation
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1550 Bryant Street, Suite 725
San Francisco CA 94103 USA
+1 415 436 9333 (voice)
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NOTE: This issue, we have a few more controversies.
Who originated the "progress v. Congress" quote?
There are two versions of the "safe depository" Jefferson quote.
Which is genuine?
Finally, many items attributed to 'anonymous' probably do have
identifiable sources.
EFF Quotes Collection 19.6
==========================
Updated: Apr. 9, 2001
A collection of the wittiest and stupidest, most sublime and most inane
comments ever said or written about free speech, cryptography, privacy,
civil liberties, networking, government, communication, society, human
nature, reason, optimism and pessimism, progress, and more.
One of the most common misconceptions one has to deal with in the endeavor
of political and social action is that one's ideas are so new that they have
no history and no basis. We all stand on the shoulders of giants in one
way or another, and hopefully spreading a few of the following bon mots can
help activists stand more firmly on the shoulders of our perceptive
forbears (and tread into the dust our less cogitative predecessors) who
could only dream of (and in some cases dread) the world we are making and
living in today.
Many thanks to the numerous Internet/Usenet users who have supplied these
quotes, and especially to the participants of the Quote of the Day and
Serial Quotations mailing lists, plus Michael Covington, John Perry Barlow,
Terry Labach, Jim Warren, Phil Agre, Peter Gutmann, Charles R. Smith, George
Osner, Declan McCullagh, Kerrin Pine, Fred Miller, and Don Olivier (and
anyone else who contributed a lot to this file before we started keeping
track of who did so.)
This file is updated fairly frequently. The latest version is archived at:
http://www.eff.org/EFF/quotes.eff
_____________________________________________________________________________
"Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the
human species -- back to the invention of stone tools and the
domestication of fire -- has been ethically ambiguous."
- Carl Sagan
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
- Thomas Jefferson
"The state is made for man, not man for the state.... That is to say,
the state should be our servant and not we its slaves."
- Albert Einstein
"It is the first step of wisdom to recognize that the major advances
in civilization are processes which all but wreck the society in which
they occur."
- Alfred North Whitehead
"Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army."
- Edward Everett
"The maxim that people should not have a right till they are ready to
exercise it properly, is worthy of the fool in the old story who
resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim."
- Thomas Babington Macaulay
"We can literally unplug a country from the Internet. We ought to think
about unplugging them."
- Richard Clarke, the US National Security Council's national
coordinator for security, on countries who "harbor cybercriminals";
reported in National Journal's Tech Daily, Mar. 22, 2001. [Sounds
fairly likely to start a war, if you ask us.]
"[T]wo wrongs may not make a right but a few dozen maybes can make a
really."
- Paul McMasters of the Freedom Forum, in a sarcastic comment on media &
public policy assumptions that the existence of various studies
indicating possible "correlations" between violent entertainment and
violent behavior, must mean that there is a one-way causal link from
viewing to aggression (and therefore a compelling government interest
in censoring violent movies, tv shows and games.)
"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and
catastrophe."
- H. G. Wells
"When censorship really works, you'll never notice."
- anonymous Internet/Usenet wisdom (also appears as
"You['ll] never know when censorship works", and
"If censorship really worked, no one would care.")
"I want to separate sin from crime. You may have to ask forgiveness
for your sins from God, but not from the Minister of Justice.
There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation."
- Pierre Elliott Trudeau, former Prime Minister of Canada, 1968,
on modernizing Canadian laws on abortion, homosexuality, & divorce.
"Communications without intelligence is noise. Intelligence
without communications is irrelevant."
- Gen. Alfred M. Gray, US Marine Corps
"Civilization is the progress of a society toward privacy. The
savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his
tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from man."
- Ayn Rand, 1943
"Today, any action anywhere on earth has an immediate repercussion on
all five continents. News of a victory of the Eastern armies in Morocco
or Shanghai travels instantly, thanks to modern means of communication,
to all Eastern peoples and fills them with enthusiasm and faith. This
phenomenon is, of course, unprecedented in the history of man."
- Nikos Kazantzakis, "Journeying", 1927
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it."
- John Hay, 1872
"Legislation needs a better reason than that lawyers like it, and that
America does it."
- Lawrence Lessig, Stanford U. law professor (and EFF boardmember)
"I believe the true danger to children would not come from exposing them
to an unfettered information medium of such magnitude that it has become a
matter-of-fact part of daily life for a majority of Americans. The
greater harm would come from weakening the First Amendment to the point
where children would grow up to become adults in a shrunken, compromised
democracy, deprived of the freedoms we now enjoy."
- Karen G. Schneider, librarian and author, in a May 16, 2000 letter to
the US Dept. of Justice refusing to testify in support of Internet
censorship laws.
"Anyone who puts a small gloss on this fundamental technology, calls
it proprietary, and then tries to keep others from building on it, is a
thief."
- Tim O'Reilly, technology book publisher, commenting on the damage
done by Amazon and other companies who have won outrageous
business-process patents.
"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know, that's a
really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they actually
change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again.
They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because
scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens
every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened
in politics or religion."
- Carl Sagan
"Redefine the possible."
- Stewart Brand, EFF boardmember emeritus, founder of Whole Earth
Catalog and the WELL.
"There ought to be limits to freedom!"
- US presidential candidate Gov. George W. Bush, press conference at the
Texas State House, May 21, 1999
"Cryptography restrictions are the USA's Maginot Line. Big, expensive,
ultimately routed around regardless, and once the war is over, difficult
to get rid of."
- Russell Nelson, Crynwr Software>
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a
democracy should be the weapon of openness."
- Niels Bohr (1885-1962) Danish physicist
"The responsibility of a citizen is to keep his mouth open."
- Gunther Grass
"The problem is that most corps think of their website as a marketing
endeavor -- like a billboard -- instead of as a front office to their
corporate headquarters. If they thought of their websites as places
where they brought their clients, those websites would be much classier
and elegant and usable -- same as their offices. You don't let your
marketing people run your front office; you shouldn't let your
marketing people run your website."
- Web designer Vanessa Layne, Feb. 14, 2000
"It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the
masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth
does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the
people."
- Giordano Bruno, 1548 (burned at the stake, 1600)
"Linking without permission is stealing. Period, end of story."
- Mark Cuban, CEO of broadcast.com
"You go to your TV to turn your brain off. You go to the computer when
you want to turn your brain on."
- Steve Jobs, quoted in Fortune magazine
"Considering the extraordinary events of the past 10 days, I am left, on
balance, with a feeling of great hope. Millions of people experienced the
Net's power to shape political discourse. They absorbed the bracing impact
of that report in real-time, with no checkpoints, no spin-doctors and no
filters. A great wall has been breached and no amount of feverish patching
in the name of 'decency' will ever make it whole again."
- David Plotnikoff (in "Starr Report on Net Creates a Real Irony", San
Jose Mercury News, Sep. 18, 1998), commenting on the release on the
Net, by the U.S. House of Representatives, of the Starr Report on
President Clinton, at a time when most of those voting to release the
sexually explicit report were also backing new Internet censorship
bills.
"People who fight may lose. People who do not fight have already lost."
- Bertolt Brecht
"[A] way to think about our propensity to exaggerate disaster is to ask
yourself, which position would you as an analyst prefer to be in? Is
it better for your reputation to predict that grim events will happen
and be wrong, or is it better for your professional credentials to be
optimistic about disaster and equally wrong. All things being the
same, the consequences of error would be much greater for the optimist
and, therefore, the prudent analyst will be grim. This fact after all
is the logic insurance policies are based on, a profitable economic
activity."
- Dr. David C. Rapoport, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at
UCLA, "Terrorism and Weapons of the Apocalypse," _National Security
Studies Quarterly_, Summer 1999 (Vol 5, Issue 3).
"Communication has changed so rapidly in the last 20 years, it's
almost impossible to predict what might occur even in the next decade.
E-mail, which now sends data hurtling across vast distances at the
speed of light, has replaced primitive forms of communication such as
smoke signals, which sent data hurtling across vast distances at the
speed of light."
- actor/comedian Steve Martin
"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are
injurious to others."
- Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia
"No viewpoints are banned. Except those banned by the law."
- Iranian President Mohammed Khatami, in response to the arrest of the
head of the opposition party Ebrahim Yezdi, leader and founder of the
"Freedom Movement" (week of 1/10/98)
"If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't have to
worry about the answers."
- Thomas Pynchon
"The word 'bipartisan' usually means some larger-than-usual deception is
being carried out."
- comedian George Carlin
"It's not Big Brother that we now have to be afraid of, but Big Browser."
- New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer, on the implications of
online data mining, New York Law Journal, Jan. 24, 2000
"Before man reaches the moon, your mail will be delivered within hours
from New York to California, from England to India, by guided missile. We
stand on the threshold of rocket mail."
- Arthur Summerfield, US Postmaster General, 23 June 1959
"At this time I do not have a personal relationship with a computer."
- US Attorney General Janet Reno, as quoted in the _New York Times_,
May 21, 1998
"If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is
that Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because
society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable."
- US Supreme Court Justice William F. Brennan, writing for the court,
in Texas v. Johnson ("the flag-burning case"), 1989.
"MR. GOLD: So what CSS is is a safety device which protects the
copyrighted material. ...So this is like a guard or a moat surrounding
the house, the protected material.
"THE COURT: Filled with litigators instead of alligators."
- Leon Gold, an attorney for an entertainment industry association and
the judge, from a court hearing in a case in which the movie industry
is attempting to punish Linux programmers for breaking the CSS
encryption system on DVDs that prevented the new format from
being played on Linux computers. (Incidentally, and contrary to
industry claims, CSS does not actually serve any copy-protection
functions, only a censorship function by rendering certain computing
platforms DVDless, and preventing people in some parts of the world
from viewing DVDs made in other parts of the world.)
"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve
change amid order."
- Alfred North Whitehead
"In our efforts to battle terrorism and cyber attacks and biological
weapons, all of us must be extremely aggressive. We must protect our
people from danger and keep America safe and free."
- US President William Clinton, May 22, 1998 (reported in a Reuters
newswire by Steve Holland)
"Hardly a day seems to go by without new evidence that official Washington
is a kind of test area for beta versions of humanity."
- columnist Sam Vincent Meddis, "On the Web", _USA Today_, May 20, 1998
"I speak the password primeval...I give the sign of democracy...."
- Walt Whitman
"Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation or
creed."
- Bertrand Russell
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you. If you
really make them think, they'll hate you."
- D.R.P. Marquis (1878-1937)
"In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test
of its value is not in its taste, but its effects."
- J. William Fulbright, speech, 21 April 1966
"[F]or those of you who are constantly belittled by your peers for
believing that Big Brother is out to get you, be assured, it is. In fact,
you are probably not paranoid enough."
- editorial, "Today's Technology Can Easily Track Criminals and
Ex-offenders", _The_ECHO_ newspaper, Jan. 1998
"We accept the risk that words and ideas have wings we cannot clip and
which carry them we know not where."
- US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in free speech case Winter v.
G.P. Putnam's Sons (938 F.2d at 1035), 1991.
"[By the end of the 20th Century there will be a generation] to whom it
will not be injurious to read a dozen quire of newspapers daily, to be
constantly called to the telephone...[and] to live half their time in a
railway carriage or in a flying machine..."
- author Max Nordau, 1895.
"Censorship is contagious, and experience with this culture of regulation
teaches that regulatory enthusiasts herald each new medium of
communications as another opportunity to spread the disease."
- Robert Corn-Revere (former US Federal Communications Commission chief
counsel), in _Rationales_&_Rationalizations:_Regulating_the_Electronic_
_Media_
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood
of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
- Thomas Jefferson
"I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I
am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."
- Robert McCloskey, State Department spokesman, at one of his
regular noon briefings during the worst days of the Vietnam
War. Marvin Kalb in _TV Guide,_ Mar. 31, 1984. Kalb says this
sage bit of advice has since been immortalized on the door to
the press booth at the State Department.
"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the
freedom of thought which they avoid."
- Soren Kierkegaard
"Let's get this straight: because there's, say, a .00001% chance of me
being killed or otherwise abused by the mob, the corner dope pusher,
kiddie porn freaks, or religious-nut bombers, I'm supposed to sacrifice my
privacy, freedom of speech, security, and other civil liberties? I think
not."
- Stanton McCandlish, Electronic Frontier Foundation program dir.
"Numerous politicians have seized absolute power and muzzled the press.
Never in history has the press seized absolute power and muzzled the
politicians."
- David Brinkley
"State Rep. Doug Teper has introduced legislation which would require the
Georgia laws against fornication, adultery, and sodomy to be posted in
hotel rooms. For those who don't comprende English, Teper has called for
'International Symbols' describing these fun activities. Get out your
drafting tools, let your imagination run wild, and send us the results.
We'll publish the winning entry."
- From _Southern_Voice_, a local weekly
"...[S]o long as the people do not care to exercise their
freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for
tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves
in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise,
to put shackles upon sleeping men."
- Voltaire
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous."
- Alfred North Whitehead
"We should be willing to look at the source code we produce not as the
end product of a more interesting process, but as an artifact in its
own right. It should look good stuck up on the wall."
- Alan & Colston's "The Programmer's Stone"
"All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the
indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of
their inherent natural rights. For happily the govenment of the United
States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,
requires only that they who live under its protection should demean [bear]
themselves as good citizens."
- George Washington, "To the Jewish Congregation, New Port, RI", 1790
"A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil
substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no
particular advantage."
- Robert McNamara
And I honor the man who is willing to sink
Half his present repute for the freedom to think,
And when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak.
- James Russell Lowell, "A Fable for Critics"
"In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and
individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary."
- Kathleen Norris
"Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or
stretched?"
- Thomas Jefferson
"Americans have an extraordinary love-hate relationship with the rich
culture they've created. They buy, watch and read it even as they ban,
block and condemn it."
- Jon Katz, _Virtuous_Reality_ (1997)
"We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes
does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism. This conjunction
fosters events that go beyond the wildest dream of satire-- if satire
existed in America anymore; perhaps the reason for its weakness is that
reality has superseded it."
- Robert Hughes, _The_Culture_of_Complaint_ (1993)
"Bill, we left megalomania behind a long time ago. Now we are
gigalomaniacs."
- Nathan Myhrvold, to Bill Gates (supposedly)
"Where did you put it?"
"Put what?"
"You know?"
"Where do you think?"
"Oh".
- Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Lab, stating his ideal model of
human-computer interaction
"The censors say they're protecting the family unit in America,
when the reality is, if you suck a tit, you're an X, but if you
cut it off with a sword, you're a PG."
- Jack Nicholson
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of
one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that
oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the
beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
- H.L. Mencken
"The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people
whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all in their separate
and individual capacities."
- assassinated U.S. President Abraham Lincoln
"The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society
outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship."
- Justice John Paul Stevens, US Supreme Court Opinion in Reno v ACLU.
"Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to
govern, but impossible to enslave."
- Henry Peter Brougham
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
- Hume
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action."
- Goethe
"All bad precedents begin with justifiable measures."
- Julius Caesar
"Falsehoods not only disagree with truths, but usually quarrel among
themselves."
- Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude
greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace.
We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. May your chains set lightly upon
you. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity
forget that ye were our countrymen."
- Samuel Adams
"Make for the children an evening of happiness in a world of storm. Let
the children have their night of fun and laughter...resolved that by our
daring, these same children shall not be denied their right to live in a
free and decent world."
- Winston Churchill, on a different kind of decency than the variety
the US Congress likes to pass unconstitutional laws about.
"The public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the
protection of every individual's private rights."
- Sir William Blackstone
"Why do security police grab people and torture them? To get their
information. If you build an information management system that
concentrates information from dozens of people, you've made that dozens
of times more attractive. You've focused the repressive regime's
attention on the hard disk. And hard disks put up no resistance to
torture. You need to give the hard disk a way to resist. That's
cryptography."
- Patrick Ball
"If you are a parent, if you are an educator, there are very many good
and powerful reasons to take children onto the Internet, but you have to
be involved with them--you cannot expect government authorities or industry
authorities or other people to do your job for you, and that is to help
guard your children against some of these things [e.g., sexually explicit
material] that are occurring out there."
- Jim Carroll, co-author of the Canadian Internet Handbook
"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form
of tyranny over the mind of man."
- Thomas Jefferson, 1800
"The greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong. If the
Government or magistrates think an individual is right, no one will
interfere with him; but when agitators talk against the things considered
holy, or when radicals criticize, or satirize political gods, or question
the justice of our laws and institutions, or pacifists talk against war,
how the old inquisition awakens, and ostracism, the excommunication of
the church, the prison, the wheel, the torture-chamber, the mob, are
called upon to suppress the free expression of thought."
- Harry Weinberger, letter to the editor, _New York Evening Post_,
April 10, 1917
"And today's generation - growing up in a mess of a world created
for them by the baby-boom generation, often has little respect for
political authority. They do not trust - and often rightly so -
political leaders, and bear a cynicism previously unseen in this
country and around the world. How can they have any respect for
governments trying to control the flow of information about bombs on
the Internet, when those same governments are responsible the sale of
arms and the subsidization of arms industries worldwide, resulting in
the death and destruction of countless innocent people worldwide?"
- Jim Carroll, 1997 Canadian Internet Handbook
"The tighter you close your fist, Governor Tarkin, the more systems will
slip through your fingers."
- the character Princess Leia, to an evil empire minion, in George Lucas'
_Star_Wars_
"Previous experience on the Internet shows that knee jerk reactions don't
work. Since anyone can post whatever he likes on the Internet, wherever he
likes, cutting off the places traditionally used to send pictures or
messages is a like using a dam to clear a polluted river; the rubbish will
back up behind the dam, and finally spill out around it. Take away the
newsgroups that are used by those posting illegal material, and they'll they
will simply post in a new newsgroup. Anyone can create new newsgroups and
anyone can post to them. There is a real danger that these posts will land
in the least expected places, like rec.disney, which has a child readership.
Can we honestly say that any child has been protected? The solution, surely,
has to be to target the people posting the material, stopping it happening
in the first place, just as we now control factory emissions instead of
spending time and money cleaning up public buildings."
- James Gardiner of Demon Internet Ltd. UK, and Stephen Balkam of the
Recreational Software Advisory Council; Sept. 2 press release (as
printed in the UK _Independent_ newspaper), in response to allegations in
another paper, the _Observer_ that Demon was used by child pornographers,
and supported them.
"Indeed, the Government's asserted 'failure' of the Internet rests on the
implicit premise that too much speech occurs in that medium, and that
speech there is too available to the participants. This is exactly the
benefit of Internet communication, however. The Government, therefore,
implicitly asks this court to limit both the amount of speech on the
Internet and the availability of that speech. This argument is profoundly
repugnant to First Amendment principles."
- Appellate Judge Stewart Dalzell, ACLU v. Reno, 1996 ("the
Communications Decency Act Case")
"A peace that comes from fear and not from the heart is the opposite of
peace."
- Gersonides
"I never approved either the errors of his book, or the trivial truths he
so vigorously laid down. I have, however, stoutly taken his side when
absurd men have condemned him for these same truths."
- Voltaire (often poorly paraphrased as "I disapprove of what he says,
but I will defend to the death his right to say it.")
"This article will probably be photocopied and passed around the offices
of exactly the same organisations that queue up to denounce copyright theft."
- _The_Economist_ editorial on online intellectual property, "The
Property of Mind", July 27, 1996.
"All fear of 'offensive' speech is bourgeois and reactionary.
Historically, profane or bawdy language was common in both the upper
and the lower classes, who lived together in rural areas amid the
untidy facts of nature. Notions of propriety and decorum come to the
fore in urbanized periods ruled by an expanding middle class, which is
obsessed with cleanliness, respectability, and conformism."
- Camille Paglia, From "Language and the Left," in _The_Advocate_ (March
7, 1995)
"The Singapore government isn't interested in controlling information,
but wants a gradual phase-in of services to protect ourselves. It's not
to control, but to protect the citizens of Singapore. In our society,
you can state your views, but they have to be correct."
- Ernie Hai, coordinator of the Singapore Government Internet Project
"Cyberspace is a work in progress. We should not squander the opportunity
to examine and appreciate a world where pornography knows no bounds."
- Cathy Cleaver, from a nonsensical Family Research Council press release
on the CDA court ruling, June 12, 1996. If this, and personal
insults hurled at federal judges, is the best the opposition can do, the
future looks bright.
"The multiple human needs and desires that demand privacy among two or
more people in the midst of social life must inevitably lead to cryptology
wherever men thrive and wherever they write."
- David Kahn, _The_Codebreakers_
"Strong-arm governments--including China, Vietnam, Singapore, and some
African military dictatorships--want to control domestic access to the Net."
- from an _ELectronic_Buyers_News_ article, "bigbrother.com", by Jack
Robertson (Apr. 22, 1996). [What does this say about the United
States and it's Communications Decency Act?]
"I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?"
- Frank Zappa, ridiculing the "Tipper Sticker" (the PRMC "parental warning"
stickers essentially forced on the music industry)
"There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?"
- Dick Cavett
"In 1971 when I joined the staff of the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab,
all of us who helped develop the operating system software, we called
ourselves hackers. We were not breaking any laws, at least not in doing
the hacking we were paid to do. We were developing software and we were
having fun. Hacking refers to the spirit of fun in which we were
developing software. The hacker ethic refers to the feelings of right
and wrong, to the ethical ideas this community of people had -- that
knowledge should be shared with other people who can benefit from it, and
that important resources should be utilized rather than wasted."
- Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, _MEME_ 2.04,
Mar. 21, 1996.
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research,
would it?"
- Albert Einstein
"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."
- L.P. Hartley
"The best answer to bad speech is good speech."
- Alan Dershowitz
"I've never met a politician who didn't like free publicity."
- William Cologie, president of the Pennsylvania Cable &
Telecommunications Association.
"There is no such thing as part freedom."
- Nelson Mandela, 1991
"...there is no poison on earth more potent, nor half so deadly, as a
partial truth mixed with passion."
- Michael Jay Tucker
"There is no practical obstacle whatsoever now to the creation of an
efficient index to _all_ human knowledge, ideas and achievements,
to the creation, that is, of a complete planetary memory for all
mankind. It foreshadows a real intellectual unification of our race.
The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be,
made accessible to every individual. In what is also of very great
importance in this uncertain world where destruction becomes continually
more frequent and unpredictable, is this, that...it need not be
concentrated in a one single place. It need not be vulnerable as a
human head or a human heart is vulnerable. It can be reproduced
exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever
else.... It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal
and the diffused vitality of an amoeba."
- H. G. Wells, 1937, talking about microfilm
"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time,
even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry
about. I worry that 10 or 15 or 20 years from now she will come to me and
say, "Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from
the Internet?'"
- EFF staff counsel Mike Godwin, "Fear of Freedom: The Backlash
Against Free Speech on the 'Net" at the Feb. 13 1996, Oakland, Calif.
New Media Technology conference.
"Two-point-five million use America Online. That's like a city. Parents
wouldn't let their kids go wandering in a city of 2.5 million people
without them, or without knowing what they're going to be doing."
- Pam McGraw, America Online spokesperson, in "Children Lured From Home
by Internet Acquaintances" by David Foster, Associated Press, June 13 95
"By way of introduction, I'm the consultant who did the 'anti-mailstorm/
anti-mailbomb' software that runs on the MX host for WHITEHOUSE.GOV...
Without going into details, if too many messages come from a single site,
the mail handler will throttle back accepting messages...If you have
legitimate mail, it will eventually get through (many messages from the same
correspondent will be flushed without acknowledgement)....Finally, if any
users on your site have any delusions about the effect of a mail bomb or
storm of mail, let me help you dispel them: (1) no one important enough
to make a difference will be affected or know or care; (2) if the
messages are nasty or threatening enough, someone equally nasty may
come and visit; (3) what you'll succeed most in doing is ruining the
weekends and/or days of underpaid civil servants as well as wasting federal
tax dollars. Please feel free to redistribute this or use parts of it in
your motd."
- Joel Snyder ([email protected]), Feb. 9 1996 message to comp.security.misc,
admin.net-abuse.misc and other Usenet newsgroups. Anyone who had
lingering questions about the imagined effectiveness of sending
gobs of flame email to the US President can probably lay them to rest.
"The function of free speech under our system of government is to invite
dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it invites a
condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are,
or even stirs people to anger."
- US Supreme Court Justice William Douglas
"I'm extraordinarily patient provided I get my own way in the end."
- Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
"If I had a large amount of money I should found a hospital for those
whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely
offended by words and phrases yet remain all unoffended by the
injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears."
- Stephen Fry
"Photons have neither morality nor visas."
- David Farber, EFF boardmember and U. of Penn. professor
"I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and
democracy - but that could change."
- then US Vice-President Dan Quayle, May 22, 1989
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
- Aldous Huxley
"On two occasions I have been asked [by Members of Parliament], `Pray, Mr.
Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers
come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of
ideas that could provoke such a question."
- Charles Babbage (inventor of the Difference Engine, an early
mechanical computer).
"The future comes one day at a time."
- Dean Acheson
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit
there."
- Will Rogers
"You have to stand for something; otherwise you will fall for anything."
- anonymous
"I'm not sure I want popular opinion on my side - I've noticed those with
the most opinions often have the fewest facts."
- Bethania McKenstry
"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with
our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions
run as causes, and they come back to us as effects."
- Herman Melville
"It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling
into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from
falling into error."
- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954)
"The First Amendment represents a conscious and explicit trade-off which
the Founding Fathers made between paternalistic protection from "harmful"
thoughts and free access to information. Where statutorily and
constitutionally protected speech is concerned, our system permits an
individual's fate to be sealed by the individual's choices rather than
governmental monitoring."
- US Fed. Dist. Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, RTC [Church of Scientology]
v. Lerma, DGS, Washington Post, Fisher, & Leiby, Nov. 29, 1995
"[L]iberty of the press is the right of the lonely pamphleteer who uses
carbon paper or a mimeograph just as much as of the large metropolitan
publisher who utilizes the latest photocomposition methods."
- judge's decision in Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665, 704 (1972).
"Humans are incapable of securely storing high-quality cryptographic
keys, and they have unacceptable speed and accuracy when performing
cryptographic operations. (They are also large, expensive to maintain,
difficult to manage, and they pollute the environment. It is
astonishing that these devices continue to be manufactured and
deployed. But they are sufficiently pervasive that we must design our
protocols around their limitations.)
- Charlie Kaufman, Radia Perlman, & Mike Speciner, _Network_Security:_
_PRIVATE_Communication_in_a_PUBLIC_World_, 1995.
"The first measure of a free society is *not* that its government performs
the will of the majority. We had that in 1930s Germany and in the South
until the '60s. The *first* measure of a free society is that its
government protects the just freedoms of its minorities. The *majority* is
quite capable of protecting itself."
- Jim Warren, _GovAccess_, Nov. 29, 1995
"The NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas
of advanced mathematics. If you'd like a circular describing these new
research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your mother, and
ask for one."
- according to Net folk lore, a joke delivered at a mathematics conference
by a senior NSA official.
"A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.
A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested."
- anonymous [Also encountered as: "A conservative is just a liberal
who's been mugged, and a liberal is just a conservative who's lost
his job!"]
"The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice."
- George Eliot
"The case for democracy is not esthetic."
- George F. Will
"Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with
what is their own business."
- Paul Valery
"Half of the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don't mean to do harm
But the harm does not interest them."
- T.S. Eliot
"1. Never do anything for the first time.
2. Pay is a function of time spent.
3. Wait until others have given clearance.
4. It is futile, so why try?
5. Make only big mistakes."
- "Johnson's Laws of Bureaucratic Immobility"
"It may be that those who do most, dream most."
- Stephen Leacock [Also quoted as "It may be those who do most, dream most."]
"If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
- Anatole France
"The great end of life is not knowledge but action."
- T. H. Huxley
"Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both."
- Eleanor Roosevelt
"Action is eloquence."
- William Shakespeare
"A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can
be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right
person's brow."
- Charles Brower
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those
who have not got it."
- George Bernard Shaw
"There is stupid. And then there is cyberstupid."
- Michael Grunwald, "[email protected]: List of Sexist Jokes About
Women Sparks an On-Line Outrage", _Boston_Globe_, Nov. 10, 1995.
"Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And,
like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master"
- George Washington, first US President
"The IRS has become a symbol of the most intrusive, oppressive and
nondemocratic institution in our Democratic Society" -
- Fred Goldberg, former US Internal Revenue Service Commissioner
"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and
write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."
- Alvin Toffler, author of _Future_Shock_ and _The_Third_Wave_
"I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean."
- G. K. Chesterton
"Don't think that every time you receive a photograph of a nude young
woman on your modem there isn't a huge, judgmental supercomputer in
Washington sighing with disgust."
- Dino Londis, "How to Buy a Dirty Magazine with a Clear Conscience"
"You are not thinking. You are merely being logical."
- Neils Bohr to Albert Einstein
"People are divided into two groups - the righteous and the unrighteous -
and the righteous do the dividing."
- Lord Cohen
"To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified."
- William James
"To do great things is difficult, but to command great things is more
difficult."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Tradition is a guide and not a jailer."
- W. Somerset Maugham
"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is it's inefficiency."
- Eugene McCarthy
"Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business.
Thanks, for a nation of finks."
- William S. Burroughs, "A Thanksgiving Prayer"
"As a free society matures it becomes more permissive, because the
converse is too horrible to contemplate."
- Joshua R. Poulson, 1986
"Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has
lost its status."
- Laurence J. Peter
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of
legitimate operators, in every nation... A graphical representation of
data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.
Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the
mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."
- William Gibson, _Neuromancer_
"Telling the future by looking at the past assumes that conditions remain
constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rear view mirror."
- Herb Brody
"Just remember--when you think all is lost, the future remains."
- Robert Goddard
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect
wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long
for the endless immensity of the sea."
- Antoine de Saint Exupery. [As a coordinator of several grassroots
projects, I find this to be very poor advice. In the end everyone
just sits around longing and doesn't do anything. - [email protected]]
"You have to organize, organize, organize, and build and
build, and train and train, so that there is a permanent,
vibrant structure of which people can be part."
- Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition
"Chinese dissident Liu Gang, 34, was arrested in September in
Liaoyuan and charged with failing to honor a previous court
order which required him to report to the police periodically and
inform them of his latest thoughts."
- "News of the Weird" (summarizing a report in _The_Daily_Breeze_, 9-3-95)
"If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have
any significant first person, present indicative."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
"In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the
learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no
longer exists."
- Eric Hoffer
"When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a
subject of interest."
- William Hazlitt
"If you think this is a free country, try selling something."
- Andrew Kantor, Senior Editor, _Internet_World_
"Once you start, the appetite for censorship knows no boundaries."
- California State Senator Bill Lockyer, May 1990
"The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it
stop."
- P.J. O'Rourke, _Parliament_of_Whores_
"You can always spot a well informed man - his views are the same as yours."
- Ilka Chase
"Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. (All things are subject to
change and we change with them.)"
- Anonymous
"Common sense is the least common of all senses."
- "Hobson's Homily"
"1 if by land, 2 if by sea."
- Paul Revere. Civilian encryption in 1775.
"It is easier to fight for one's principles than
to live up to them."
- Alfred Adler (1870-1937)
"Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their
simplification."
- Martin H. Fischer
"Open-minded people look at the world around them and try to find the
lessons there that apply to their own lives, while narrow-minded people
look at the lessons their own life has brought them and try to apply
these to the world at large."
- M. Elizabeth Hunter <[email protected]>, 6 Jul 1995
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
- _Popular_Mechanics_, 1949
"Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to
you. Security is the denial of life."
- Germaine Greer
"If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."
- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
"Perish discretion when it interferes with duty."
- Hannah More
"They don't call it the Net of a Million Lies for nothing."
- Vernor Vinge, _A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep_ (said by a character in this novel,
in reference to a future galaxy-wide Internet.)
"The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty and a premium
upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury."
- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemmens), _Roughing_It_
"If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as
to be out of danger?"
- Thomas Henry Huxley
"We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others, by their acts."
- Harold Nicolson
"Laws are like spider's webs: If some poor weak creature comes up against
them, it is caught; but a big one can break through and get away."
- Solon
"When you say you agree to a thing on principle, you mean that you have
not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice."
- Otto Von Bismarck (1815-1898)
"Technical solutions, such as they are, will only work if they are
incorporated into *all* encryption products. To ensure that this occurs,
legislation mandating the use of Government-approved encryption products or
adherence to Government encryption criteria is required."
- FBI, NSA and Justice Department secret briefing document to the
National Security Council, Feb. 1993, "Encryption: The Threat,
Applications and Potential Solutions", obtained by Freedom of
Information Act lawsuit by EPIC.
"Go as far as you can see, and when you get there, you'll see farther."
- anonymous
"There is a point beyond which even justice becomes unjust."
- Sophocles, "Electra"
"Acquittal of the guilty damns the judge."
- Horace
"Lawyers are men who hire out their words and anger."
- Horace
"A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better
lawyer."
- Robert Frost
"Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it,
anything but live for it."
- Charles Caleb Cotton
"I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"If you don't go far enough back in memory or far enough ahead in hope,
your future will be impoverished."
- Ed Lindeman (heard at the American Planners Assn. conference
"It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it
frankly and try another. But above all, try something."
- former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt
"Do not become archivists of facts. Try to penetrate to the secret of
their occurrence, persistently search for the flaws that govern them."
- Ivan Pavlov
"We can't all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap
as they go by."
- Will Rogers (1879-1935)
"The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's
unfamiliar territory."
- Paul Fix
"The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on
skim milk because the baby can't eat steak."
- author Robert A. Heinlein on censorship.
"The great thing about the Internet is that it will not abide by the rules."
- Richard Curtis, author of "Blackadder" and _Four_Weddings_and_a_Funeral_
"The deadliest bullshit is odorless and transparent."
- William Gibson
"No matter what happens, there's always somebody
who knew it would."
- Lonny Starr
"If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out but tomfoolery.
But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is
somehow ennobled and no-one dares criticise it."
- Pierre Gallois (1911-)
"Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint
which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark."
- Henri-Frederic Amiel
"There is change by necessity or adaptation, and there is contrived
change or novelty."
- Wendell Berry on kinds of cultural change
"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think
little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and
Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination."
- Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859)
"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve
change amid order."
- Alfred North Whitehead
"The notion dies hard that in some sort of way exports are patriotic but
imports are immoral."
- Lord Harlech [Try telling that to the US Depts. of State and
Commerce, and the National Security Agency, who's position on
cryptography export is someone inconsistent with this maxim, to say the
least.
"If you won't tell me that you use PGP, I will tell you nothing. But
without authorization, it's illegal. And PGP has little chance of ever
being authorized for our agency."
- J. Vincent-Carrefour, DISSI - security & encryption agency.
"Americans have checked out of politics. It's not just a problem with
one segment of the American public. People are disengaged across all
kinds of socioeconomic and ethnic categories."
- Tamar Datan, Pew Charitable Trust, as reported in _The_Chronicle_of_
_Philanthropy_, Sept. 21, in article "Renewing American Democracy:
Foundations Seek to Revers a Loss of Faith in the Political Process".
"I like something with `vice' in it."
- Ted Turner, on his new role as vice chariman of Time Warner.
"It's easy to tell when a politician is lying. Watch his lips. If they
move, he's lying."
- Charles Lyall
"We all know that all politicians are liars, including ourselves."
- Kingston, Ontario, city councilman Dave Meers, at an Apr. 1995
council meeting in which he argued the uselessness of inviting
candidates for the provincial legislature to appear before the
council to give their platforms
"A precedent embalms a principle."
- Benjamin Disraeli
"Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president but they don't
want them to become politicians in the process."
- Former US President John F. Kennedy
"The Internet is a perfect diversion from learning...[it] opens many
doors that lead to empty rooms."
- Cliff Stoll, skeptical author of _The_Cuckoo's_Egg_ and
_Silicon_Snake_Oil_, at Aug. 16 Bay Area EFF meeting.
"One must spend time in gathering knowledge to give it out richly."
- Edward C. Steadman
"It's similar to what the library was 100 years ago, or the telegraph.
It will be bigger and better than television. We're not talking about a
500-channel medium. We're talking about 250,000 channels that speak
across all borders. It represents who we are, how we act, transact
business and engage in relationships. The Internet is about
information empowerment. I think it will change world culture."
- Michael Wolff, _Investor's_Business_Daily_ column, Sep. 21, 1995.
"The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens
free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits."
- Thomas Jefferson
"Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than by the
arguments of its opponents."
- anonymous
"New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not
belittled, the humiliating question arises, 'Why then are you not
taking part in them?' "
- H. G. Wells
"Good work is always done in defiance of management."
- R. Woodward
"If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without
bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and
not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight
with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival.
There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no
hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."
- Winston Churchill
"Men must fumble awhile with error to separate it from truth, I think--as
long as they don't seize the error hungrily because it has a pleasanter
taste."
- Walter M. Miller, Jr. (in _A_Canticle_for_Liebowitz_)
"When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others
to laugh at him."
- Thomas Szasz
"I don't give a shit about your network".
- New Zealand (Howick) Member of Parliament Trevor Rogers on his plans to
"clean up" the Internet; from _Bits_and_Bytes_, May 1995.
"If I get one more bloody fool that writes to me saying I'm trying to close
the Internet down I just might do it"
- Again, New Zealand Member of Parliament Trevor Rogers on his plans to
"clean up" the Internet; from _Bits_and_Bytes_, May 1995.
"The Film, Video, and Publications Act also breached the Bill of Rights and
it became law. Parliament is bigger than the Bill of Rights".
- New Zealand (Howick) Member of Parliament Trevor Rogers, on Minister
of Justice's comments that Rogers' anti-computer-communications bill
is unconstitutional.
"No! Thank God!"
- New Zealand (Howick) Member of Parliament Trevor Rogers in response
to the question, "Does New Zealand have anything akin to the [US] First
Amendment?" asked by Kim Scheinberg in a recent interview.
"This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it
capitalism, call it what you will, gives each and every one of us a
great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the
most of it."
- gangster Al Capone
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
- Albert Einstein
"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at
children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end,
which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to
which it is most attached is called, ``Keep tomorrow dark,'' and which is
also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) ``Cheat the
Prophet.'' The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that
the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation.
The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them
nicely. Then they go and do something else. That is all. For a race of
simple tastes, however, it is great fun."
- G. K. Chesterton
"Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder,
and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike."
- Plato
"So, Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because
it permits criticism."
- E. M. Forster
"Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody
else has thought."
- Albert Szent-Gyoergi
"Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean
more in a university, where a few undisciplinables ... may be infinitely
more precious than a faculty full of orderly routinists."
- William James
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
- Richard Feynman
"In all things it is a good idea to hang a question mark now and then
on the things we have taken for granted."
- Bertrand Russel
"I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education."
- Wilson Mizner
"The man scarce lives who is not more credulous than he ought to be.... The
natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and
experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it
enough."
- Adam Smith
"In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister
quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors,
such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's
ribs loose, and ready for ``King Lear,'' or a hanging, or a course of
medical journals."
- H. L. Mencken
"A tranquil city of good laws, fine architecture, and clean streets is like
a classroom of obedient dullards, or a field of gelded bulls-- whereas a
city of anarchy is a city of promise."
- Mark Helprin
"Reality is just a crutch for people that can't handle CyberSpace!!"
- Hank Duderstadt
"Where would Christianity be if Jesus got eight to fifteen years with
time off for good behavior?"
- New York State Senator James Donovan, speaking in support of capital
punishment. Quoted in the liner notes of an album by Jello Biafra &
Mojo Nixon.
"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts,
foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation
that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an
open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
- John F. Kennedy, assassinated U.S. president
"Faith which does not doubt is dead faith."
- Miguel de Unamuno
"It was then that the American authorities turned up the facts about my
past as an anarchist activist---the past from which I had already
distanced myself mentally. At that time I was working on the final
revision of my book, and Proudhon was much in my mind on the day I went
down to the consulate in Vancouver for the crucial interview. I imagine
that my past as editor of _Freedom_ was enough, under the McCarran Act,
to keep me out, but the consul had the air of giving me a last chance
when he asked if I was still an anarchist. I thought a moment and, with
Proudhon in my mind, answered, 'fundamentally and philosophically, yes.'
It was enough for him, and for me. I was excluded in perpetuity from
the United States, the only country in the world I have been unable to
enter, and I settled down with great satisfaction to be a writer in my
own country, which I have in no way regretted."
- writer and anarchist George Woodcock, on being denied entry into the
United States to take a job at the University of Washington. This
was done under the McCarran Act, which allowed U.S. officials to deny
entry into the U.S. of those people espousing foreign ideas and alien
philosophies. Current (1995) US "anti-terrorist" legislation has
features very similar to the (repealed) McCarran Act.
"Serious rational criticism is so rare that it should be encouraged.
Being too ready to defend oneself is more dangerous than being too
ready to admit a mistake."
- Sir Karl Popper
"I rarely saw people sitting at computers producing real code
wearing ties."
- Philippe Kahn (speech at Software Development '90 conference)
"A great deal of information we consider to be highly personal, and
of interest to ourselves and the town gossip our names, telephone
numbers, marital status, educational accomplishments, job and
credit histories, even medical, dental, and psychiatric records is
now being sold on the open market to anyone who believes he or she
might be able to use such information to turn a profit. These
transactions usually take place without our knowledge or consent.
- Anne Wells Branscomb, _Who_Owns_Information?_,1994
"You have no idea what a REAL hatchet job is: you don't _understand_ the
meaning of savage. My lynching has been more savage and more personal than
any other in the history of the Net."
- Martin Rimm, author of a widely and thoroughly discredited "study" of
pornography online.
"In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't
speak up because I wasn't a Jew. They they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came
for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then
they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."
- Martin Niemoeller, on the Nazi Holocaust
"First they came for the hackers. But I never did anything
illegal with my computer, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the pornographers. But I thought there was
too much smut on the Internet anyway, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the anonymous remailers. But a lot of nasty
stuff gets sent from anon.penet.fi, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the encryption users. But I could never
figure out how to work PGP anyway, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for me. And by that time there was no one left
to speak up."
- Alara Rogers, Aleph Press
"Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
"Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should
soon want bread."
- Thomas Jefferson
"Silence is the language of complicity."
- anonymous
"You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep."
- Navajo Proverb
"In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and
the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it
appear that it has."
- Mark Twain
"Prediction is extremely difficult. Especially about the future."
- Niels Bohr
"God prevent we should ever be twenty years without a revolution."
- Thomas Jefferson
"The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact
mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows."
- Frank Zappa
"When we deal with questions relating to principles of law and their
applications, we do not suddenly rise into a stratosphere of icy certainty."
- Charles Evans Hughes
"Like adequate education, freedom of expression is no longer a politcal
nicety, but a precondition for economic competitiveness."
- Alvin Toffler
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in
having new eyes."
- Proust [Particularly interesting if infrastructures = landscapes.]
"We no longer have roots, we have aerials."
- Ken Wark
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and
making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die,
and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
- physicist Max Planck
"All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like
poetry, their own assumptions. The new media are not ways of relating us
the "real" world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of
the old world at will."
- Marshall McLuhan
"The believer is happy. The doubter is wise."
- Hungarian proverb
"Televison allows thousands of people to laugh at the same joke and still
remain alone."
- Bertrand Russell
"We're not left-wing or right-wing, we're up-wing."
- John Gilmore, EFF co-founder, in reference to the Electronic Frontier
Foundation's politics.
"Where's there's money involved, there are no good guys."
- Rob Glaser, EFF board member
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it."
- John Gilmore, EFF co-founder [The Internet was designed specifically
to route around damaged nodes and connections, so that it would
still be a viable network in case of nuclear or other attack.]
"Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control
as threats and mobilizes to defeat them."
- Eric S. Raymond's Jan. 2, 2000, corollary to Gilmore's observation
(particularly in reference to the Linux community cracking DVD
encryption.)
"When men discuss the things which are to be, the rats laugh in the rafters."
- anonymous
"It would not be long ere the whole surface of this country would be
channelled for those nerves which are to diffuse, with the speed of
thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land, making,
in fact, one neighborhood of the whole country."
- Samuel F.B. Morse, telecommunications pioneer
"The right most prized by civilized men is the right to be let alone."
- US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. [This appears to be either
a mis-quote, or a short version of something that was expressed in
longer form by Brandeis as: "The makers of our Constitution undertook
to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They
recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his
feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the
pain, pleasure, and satisfaction of life are to be found in
material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their
thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against
the government, the right to be let alone--the most comprehensive of
rights and the right most valued by civilized men."]
"History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot."
- Mark Twain
"If I seem to take part in politics, it is only because politics encircles
us today like the coil of a snake from which one cannot get out, no matter
how much one tries. I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"We can be knowledgable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise
with other men's wisdom."
- Montaigne
"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies,
to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied
is more speech, not enforced silence."
- US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
"Is it a fact - or have I dreamt it - that, by means of
electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating
thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe
is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!"
- Nathanial Hawthorne
"I choose free libraries as the best agencies for improving the
masses of the people, because they give nothing for nothing. They only
help those who help themselves. They never pauperize. They reach the
aspiring and open to these chief treasures of the world -- those stored up
in books. A taste for reading drives out lower tastes."
- Andrew Carnegie
"In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."
- Michael Apostolius
"Life is a process which may be abstracted from other media."
- John Von Neumann
"The more you've got, the shorter it feels."
- "Barlow's Law of Economics", John Perry Barlow, EFF co-founder.
"Any system of 'justice' in which ignorance of the law is no exception,
but in which there are too many laws for any one person to know and
remember, _is_by_definition_unjust_."
- "McCandlish's Law of Unjust Bureaucracy", Stanton McCandlish, EFF
online activist; 1993.
"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison
involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."
- "Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies", Mike Godwin, EFF staff counsel.
"As soon as such a comparison occurs, someone will start a
Nazi-discussion spinoff thread on alt.censorship."
- "Morgan's Corollary to Godwin's Law"
"Libertarianism (pro, con, and internal faction fights) is *the*
primordial netnews discussion topic. Anytime the debate shifts
somewhere else, it must eventually return to this fuel source."
- "Gordon's Restatement of Newman's Corollary to Godwin's Law"
"If the USENET discussion touches on homosexuality or Heinlein, Nazis or
Hitler are mentioned within three days."
- "Sircar's Corollary to Godwin's Law"
"As global connectivity improves, the probability of actual Nazis being
on the net approaches one."
- "Van der Leun's Corollary to Godwin's Law", Gerard Van der Leun, former
EFF Cambridge office director. This corollary is already proven.
"As a network evolves, the number of Nazi comparisons not forestalled by
citation to Godwin's Law converges to zero."
- "Miller's Paradox"
"The chance of success of any attempt to change the topic or direction of a
thread of discussion in a networked forum is directly proportional to the
quality of the current content."
- "The Wilcox/McCandlish Law of Online Discourse Evolution", Bryce
Wilcox & Stanton McCandlish (EFF online activist); 1995.
"The chance of any change to the topic or direction of a thread being a
change for the better is inversely proportional to the quality of the
content before the change."
- "McCandlish's First Corollary to the Wilcox/McCandlish Law", Stanton
McCandlish, EFF online activist; 1995.
"When a thread reaches the flame-war stage, all changes in
thread topic or direction will be changes for the worse."
- "The Exception to McCandlish's First Corollary to the Wilcox/McCandlish
Law", Stanton McCandlish, EFF online activist; 1995.
"Thread bandwidth consumption increases in inverse proportion to thread
content quality."
- "McCandlish's Second Corollary to the Wilcox/McCandlish Law", Stanton
McCandlish, EFF online activist; 1995.
"The more involved one is in a flame-war, the less likely one is to
recognize it as such."
- "Wilcox's Corollary to the Wilcox/McCandlish Law", Bryce Wilcox; 1995.
"Thread degeneration can (theoretically) be forestalled or even reversed by
citation to the Wilcox/McCandlish Law."
- "The Wilcox/McCandlish Paradox", Bryce Wilcox and Stanton McCandlish
(EFF online activist); 1995.
"Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information
available."
- "Benford's Law of Controversy", Gregory Benford, 1980.
"Participating in the newest communications technologies becomes
compulsory if you want to remain part of the culture."
- "Porush's Law", David Porush, 1994.
"90% of everything is crap."
- "Sturgeon's Law", Theodore Sturgeon
"If pornographers are among the early adopters of the new technology,
then it has definite commercial possibilities."
- "Jackson's Law of Media Futures", Tim Jackson, _Financial_Times_
"A man who smiles when things go wrong
has thought of someone he can blame it on."
- "Jones' Law"
"There is nothing so asinine that governments will not proclaim it as
official doctrine."
- "Nolan's Observation"
"We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to
operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to
avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free
to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and
subvert."
- J. Robert Oppenheimer
"Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit."
- Henry Adams
"I love the Constitution and government of this land, but I hate the damned
rascals that administer the government."
- Brigham Young
"The demand to abandon illusions about our condition is a demand to abandon
the conditions which require illusions."
- anonymous
"Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it."
- Andre Gide
"Security begins as a state of mind."
- NSA Employee Manual leaked to the public via the Internet.
"Politics consits in the art of taking votes from the poor and money from
the rich under the pretext of protecting each from the other."
- anonymous
"Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds."
- George Santayana
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea,
which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to
himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the
possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because
every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me,
receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his
taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should
freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual
instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been
peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like
fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any
point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical
being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then
cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
- Thomas Jefferson
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty
than those attending too small a degree of it."
- Thomas Jefferson
"The history of liberty is a history of of resistance. The history of
liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the
increase of it."
- former US President Woodrow Wilson
"I'm old enough to be living in the future I was warned about."
- Myron Krueger
"History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people
who weren't there."
- George Santayana
"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention
of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of
attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the
overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
- Nobel laureate economist Herbert Simon, _Scientific_American_,
Sept. 1995.
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry
about the answers."
- Thomas Pynchon
"There is no such thing at this date of the world's history in America
as an independent press. You know it, and I know it. There is not one
of you who dares to write his honest opinion, and if you did, you know
beforehand it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for
keeping my honest opinion out of the paper. Others of you are paid
similar salaries for similar things. and any of you who would be so
foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking
for another job. If I allow my honest opinions to appear in one issue
of my paper, before 24 hours, my occupation would be gone. The
business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to
pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon and to sell his
country and his race for his daily bread. You know it, and I know it,
and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools
and the vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping
jacks. They pull the strings, and we dance. Our talents, our
possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are
intellectual prostitutes."
- John Swinden, 1953, then head of the New York Times, when asked to
toast an independent press in a gathering at the National Press Club
(at a time when the public was not allowed to attend).
"Satire dramatizes better than any other use of it, the inherent
contradiction of free speech -- that it functions best when what is being
said is at its most outrageous."
- Tony Hendra, "Going Too Far"
"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and
by parts."
- Edmund Burke, letter, April 3, 1777, to the Sheriffs of Bristol
"The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise titles,
the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue...There is a
perpetual interference with personal liberty over there that would not be
tolerated in England for a week."
- Margot Asquith, _My_Impressions_of_America_, ch. 17 (1922)
"Never trust a computer which you cannot lift."
- Dave Boulton
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to
function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are
hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
- Voltaire
"The decisions made in the Nation's Capitol during the last
5 years of this century will set the 21st century course of America
and American science. If we think more wisdom should be brought to
bear on those decisions, it is our obligation to say so now to
those making these decisions."
- From an Aug., 1995 statement by the Council of Scientific Society
Presidents
"The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority
from assuming a guardianship of the public mind ... because the forefathers
did not trust government to separate the true from the false."
- Thomas v. Collins, 323 US 516 (1945)
"Filtering out [potentially offensive online] material at the user end is
a more practical, and far less objectionable, approach than limiting a
nation of computer users to baby talk."
- _New_York_Times_ editorial, July 28, 1995.
"Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they
are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't
even arise."
- Jean Baudrillard, _Cool_Memories_, 1987 (tr. 1990)
"Use the word 'cybernetics,' Norbert, because nobody knows what it
means. This will always put you at an advantage in arguments."
- Claude Shannon (the Father of Information Theory) in a letter to
Norbert Weiner of M.I.T., in the 40's. (Wiener's book _Cybernetics_
was published in 1961.)
"Are they thinking just of commercial software? Are they thinking?"
- Jim Gillogly, on the sponsors of the "Anti-Electronic Racketeering"
bill, which is so poorly written that it would effectively ban
people from exchanging shareware and freeware on the Internet: "It
shall be unlawful to use a computer or computer network to transfer
unlicensed computer software, regardless of whether the transfer
is performed for economic consideration.". From "S.974 - Beyond Clipper
and Digital Wiretap", _PRIVACY_Forum_Digest_ Vol 4, No. 16; July 19, 1995.
"I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities,
we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in
politics but for our contributions to the human spirit."
- former US President John F. Kennedy
"Congress may not enact discriminatory legislation because it desires to
insulate heterosexual service members from statements that might excite
their prejudices."
- US Federal Judge Eugene Nickerson, in his ruling against the "Don't
ask, don't tell" policy regarding gays in the US military.
"There is something sexy about a computer nerd."
- actress Sandra Bullock
"Our problems are not new. We must not sign away our freedom and our reason
to make things even easier for the [politicians]. The only cure for bad
information is better information. You are in charge now; use your power
wisely."
- Jon Carroll, "I Have Met the Enemy. I Have Bad News", _San_Francisco_
_Chronicle_, June 29, 1995.
"Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature; sex is a weak second."
- Phil Kerby
"If the Catholic church couldn't stop Galileo, then governments won't
be able to stop things now."
- Carlo de Benedetti of Olivetti on the folly of trying to regulate
information technology
"The United States should....avoid unilateral export controls and controls
on technology widely available in world markets. Unilateral controls penalize
U.S. exporters without advancing U.S. national security or foreign policy
interests."
- William Clinton, President of the United States, September, 1992.
Less than a year later, the Clinton Admistration attempted to foist the
"Clipper" backdoor-infested encryption scheme on the public, using
unilateral export controls of cryptographic software as the
hammer to drive the regulatory nails.
"Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily."
- George Santayana
"Children are not being assaulted by images that appear on a computer
screen. Any Internet user knows it is quite difficult to stumble across
pornography."
- Sen. Russel Feingold (D-WI), in a letter to the editor of the
_Washington_Post_, July 15, 1995, debunking a previous letter from
Communications Decency Act co-sponsor Sen. Dan Coats.
"It's a truism at this point that if you're looking for information, good
information, you don't look for it online. Sure, the thinking goes,
there's plenty of information online. Rumors. Rants. Half-baked opinions.
What you find online may be interesting -- that man-in-the-street stuff
has its moments -- but by and large it's put together by amateurs. Real
journalism comes from professionals. It's been fascinating watching
this idea get turned on its head."
- Robert Rossney, "Time's Story on Cyberporn of Questionable Validity",
_San_Francisco_Chronicle_, July, 1995.
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those of us who profess to
favor freedom yet depreciate agitation are men who want the crops
without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder. They want
the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters...This struggle may
be a moral one or a physical one, but it must be a struggle. Power
concedes nothing without demand. It never has and never will. Show me the
exact amount of wrong and injustices that are visited upon a person and I
will show you the exact amount of words endured by these people. These
wrongs and injustices may be fought with words or with blows or both. The
limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they
oppose."
- Frederick Douglass
"It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is
the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow."
- Robert H. Goddard
"History has shown that there are very few mechanisms as effective at
maintaining the status quo as a set of institutionalized regulations. Once
set in regulatory concrete, reconsideration of the basic underlying
assumptions is very difficult. While it will be an uphill fight to
re-examine the basic underlying assumptions of any law or administrative
rule, it is clearly not impossible. It will just take longer than if not so
well institutionalized."
- Paul Baran, "Is the UHF Frequency Shortage a Self-Made Problem",
Marconi Radio Centennial Symposium, Bologna Italy, June 23 1995.
"If any issue should unite liberals and conservatives, anyone who cares
about the integrity of human achievement or respect for human
accomplishment, may we not all pledge to avoid the silly censoring that
can lead to a codification of Orwell's Newspeak? Consider John Milton's
reasons for why good arguments are often lost: 'For want of words, no
doubt, or lack of breath!'
- Stephen Jay Gould, "No More 'Wretched Refuse': The Language Police Edit
Emma Lazarus", _New_York_Times_ Op-Ed page, June 7, 1995.
"It is never too late to give up your prejudices."
- Henry David Thoreau, _Walden_
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the
exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
- Frederick Douglass
"Article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression;
this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to
seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and
regardless of frontiers."
- United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted Dec.10,
1948. This article is frequently violated in both spirit and letter
by most UN member governments, including that of the United States.
"It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the
situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is
more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right
to think their own thoughts."
- Boris Yeltsin, _Against_the_Grain:_An_Autobiography_ (tr. Michael
Glenny' Summit Books, 1990; p. 172)
"The DEFENSE of anything is UNTENABLE. The only way to defend anything
is to ATTACK, and if you ever forget that, then you will lose every
battle you are ever engaged in, whether it is in terms of personal
conversation, public debate, or a court of law. NEVER BE INTERESTED IN
CHARGES. DO, yourself, much MORE CHARGING, and you will WIN."
- L. Ron Hubbard, science fiction author, and founder of the Church of
Scientology.
"This is nothing less than thought control."
- Constitutional law scholar Lawrence Tribe, on the FCC's anti-"indecency"
crusade.
"Our culture is at a critical cusp - a time that requires that we define
what it means to be a citizen in a democracy. Within our nation we need to
foster a greater sense of collective responsibility."
- Robert Bellah, author
"Have you ever gotten tired of hearing those ridiculous AT&T commercials
claiming credit for things that don't even exist yet? You will."
- Emmanuel Goldstein, publisher of _2600:_The_Hacker_Quarterly_, 1995
"There are already laws prohibiting the promotion of hatred and we are
now considering new laws to establish limits on the use of the Internet
and other forms of communication in a way that might be harmful to us all."
- Allan Rock, Canadian Minister of Justice, in response to a question
regaring whether or not students should be protected from "unwanted
exposure" to "extremist movements promoting anti-social behaviour"
online. From a virtual conference hosted by Canada's SchoolNet MOO
forum, May 1995. The second meaning one can infer ("...limits...
harmful to us all") is really a delicious bit of double entendre.
"This is not politics... it's to protect the innocence of children."
- Sen. Bob Dole on the introduction of his new "Protection of Children
From Computer Pornography Act of 1995."
"You wouldn't believe some of this stuff. Every time I sit down at the
computer I've got some pornographic picture waiting for me."
- IL state Senator Walter Dudycz (R-Chicago), on "Internet pornography".
Dudycz "investigated" pornographic material on the "Internet" by
masquerading as a 15-year-old female in America Online chat areas, and
subsequent to the sucess of this act and the resulting propositions
from strange men, drafted a state bill to censor online media.
Your tax dollars at work, Chicago.
"We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means
doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case,
the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive."
- C.S. Lewis
"Joyous distrust is a sign of health. Everything absolute belongs to
pathology."
- Nietzsche
"Stop thinking about it as the 'information superhighway' and start
thinking about it as the 'marketing superhighway.' Doesn't it
sound better already?"
- Don Logan, president and CEO of Time Inc., addressing the 85th annual
meeting of the Association of National Advertisers, as reported by
_New_York_Times_, Oct. 18, 1994, p. D22.
"...But as records of courts and justice are admissible, it can
easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed
and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession)
upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was
without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable. The judges' decisions based
on it were sound in logic and in law. Nothing in any existing court
was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and
sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches,
human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value."
- Ambrose Bierce, _The_Devil's_Dictionary_
"You are all optimizing against the imaginable, not the probable. And the
imaginable, especially the imaginable evil, has no inertia at all. There
is no limit to what it might do and therefore, there is no limit to what one
must do to prevent it...If we are to design all of our policies around the
worst thing that could possibly happen, if we are trying to achieve a
world of such absolute safety that no one in power can ever be blamed for
a human-caused catastrophe, we will have to endow law enforcement with
powers of surveillance which will make a police state not just imaginable
but probable."
- EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow, in a letter to Administration staffers
regarding the Clipper and Digital Telephony surveillance scheme, on
which the Administration refused to back down, citing fear of terrorists
using untappable communications to plan a nuclear bombing of the
World Trade Center, and the reaction the voting public would have
toward the Adminstration in the event of such terrorism.
"I want the ability to monitor high-tech communications among
far-flung terrorists. I want to be able to have our people learn their
plans before they strike. That's the key."
- US President Bill Clinton, radio address, Saturday, May 20, 1995
"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of
Congress. But I repeat myself."
- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
"The Constitution may not be perfect, but it's a helluva lot better that
what the government's using these days."
- anonymous, quoted in _GovAccess_ #119, May 18, 1995
"We have to get over this idea that the Net is an ogre that has
to be defended against."
- Bob Gibbs, telecom computer crime expert at the Federal Law
Enforcement Training Center. _U.S._News_and_World_Report, week of
May 22, 1995.
"The Internet is simply a means of communication. Efforts to stop
information by enjoining it are doomed to failure in a free society."
- Prof. Frank Tuerkheimer, University of Wisconsin at Madison.
_U.S._News_and_World_Report_, week of May 22, 1995.
"If [museums, galleries and concert halls] were closed I should feel an
infinitely poorer man, as though my income of possible pleasures had
been cut down. I love [them], indeed, as noble reserves of pleasure on
which I can draw at need. I can bear not visiting them, but I could not
bear so easily not having them to visit."
- Robert Lynd, from "On Never Going to the British Museum"
_The_Portable_Irish_Reader_, 1946. A sentiment many Internauts
might understand in light of today's efforts at net.censorship.
"Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All
through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over
their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the
grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most
depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform
any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of
the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a
parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us."
- P.J. O'Rourke, _Parliament of Whores_
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases
to exist."
- Salman Rushdie (whose criticism of Islam inspired Muslim leaders
to put a price on his head and condemn him to death.)
"It is no solution to define words as violence or prejudice as
oppression, and then by cracking down on words or thoughts pretend that
we are doing something about violence and oppression. No doubt it is
easier to pass a speech code or hate-crimes law and proclaim the streets
safer than actually to make the streets safer, but the one must never be
confused with the other...Indeed, equating "verbal violence" with
physical violence is a treacherous, mischievous business."
- Jonathon Rauch, in an essay in _Harper's_Magazine_, May 1995
"I think there are certainly going to be lots of debates about the
Internet. My hunch is that the First Amendment rights are going to
prevail, and that in fact this is an astonishingly free country and pretty
much intends to remain that way, and the Internet will just be one more
expression of our freedom... I think [with encryption] you have a
different set of questions. I think clearly no American wants terrorists
to be able to have a level of secrecy which enables them to organize ways
of killing people, on the other hand people do want the right to
confidentiality. I think that is a very...that is going to take some
time to explore."
- Speaker of the US House of Representatives Newt Gingrich in response
to questions about free speech and crypto by Jeff Ubois at the opening
ceremony for the Smithsonian institution WWW site, May 1995.
"Fertilizer played a greater role in this case than computers."
- EFF's Mike Godwin on the Oklahoma City bombing and allegations that the
Internet may have been used by militias in planning the bombing; as
quoted in _Entertainment_Weekly_, week of May 7, 1995. The bomb used
was made from fertilizer and fuel oil.
"I love to doubt as well as know."
- Dante
"The information highway is being sold to us as delivering
information, but what it's really delivering is data... Unlike data,
information has utility, timeliness, accuracy, a pedigree... Editors
serve as barometers of quality, and most of an editor's time is spent
saying no."
- _Cuckoo's_Egg_ author and astronomer Cliff Stoll, in his new book
_Silicon_Snake_Oil_, 1995.
"I've said many times that I have what I call the Charney Theorem, stating
that there is always a percentage of the population up to no good. Right
now if you look at the people in our society who are up to no good, only
a small percentage are computer-literate. If you fast-forward 30 years,
they'll all be computer-literate."
- U.S. Justice Dept. chief computer crime investigator Scott Charney,
_Investor's_Business_Daily_, Apr. 18, 1995
"Most Americans still can't figure out how to program their VCRs.
They are not going to be able to get onto the World Wide Web and locate, on
some obscure bulletin board, the latest copies of Microsoft's computer
programs."
- U.S. Patent & Trademark Office Commissioner Bruce Lehman, on why he
thinks currect intellectual property law will last well into the
next century. From _Forbes_, Apr. 10, 1995, p. 51
"Digital technology is the universal solvent of intellectual property
rights."
- Tom Parmenter (from _Desperado_, issue 12).
"...We have seen dog-tired Members [of Congress] marching lockstep ahead
with their eyes fixed only on the end of the 100 Days [of the 1995
Republican 'Contract with America' reform efforts]. Many of the
changes wrought by the House were passed without the benefit of a single
hearing, or at best with a minimal legislative record. Is this what
Jefferson and Madison had in mind?"
- Dr. John Gibbons, Science Advisor to the President, from the keynote
address of the Apr. 12, 1995 American Assoc. for the Advancement of
Science's Policy Colloquium
"The Department of Justice should resolutely bar monopolizing mergers in
all markets, including telecommunications, but they are not in a
position, as is the FCC, to promote new competition by selling the
airwaves in auctions."
- FCC Chair Reed Hundt, in an open letter to the Apr. 14, 1995
_Washington_Post_, opposing the abolition of the FCC
"When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent.
When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun.
Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet."
- Myhr Lyle <[email protected]>, email signature file, 1995.
"...There's a battle...between the hunger for roots, stability, law and
another element...which is anarchic. I hate to obey speed laws, I hate
to park where it says you have to park. I hate to have to be someplace
on time. And in fact I often don't do those things I know I should do,
which of course fills me with uneasiness and guilt. Every time you break
the law you pay, and every time you obey the law you pay."
- John Gardner
"In English, 'con-' is the opposite of 'pro-', therefore Congress must be the
opposite of progress."
- [email protected]
[A reader notes that this is a paraphrase of a Mark Twain quote. Seeking
verification. Another attributes it to the comedian Gallagher. Hmm.
Another reports this anonymous version - "Pro is to con as progress is
to Congress."]
"Official truths are often powerful illusions."
- John Pilger, _Distant_Voices_, 1992
"The price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the
entire moral courage of the human mind."
- John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty", 1859
"The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can
be managed only by a specialised class."
- Walter Lippman, _Manufacturing_Consent_, 1921
"A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively
what no one believes individually."
- Abba Eban
"Is this true or only clever?"
- Augustine Birrell
"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you
didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.
- Leslie Lamport, DEC Systems Research Center, 1987
"'National Security': the root password to the Constitution.
- Phil Karn. Karn has been battling the US State Department's
cryptographic software export ITAR restrictions since 1993.
"...don't go looking for alt.love. It doesn't exist."
- Rob Pegoraro, _Washington_Post_
"That article and its poster have been canceled."
- David B. O'Donnell, Sysadmin, America OnLine
"Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience."
- Clarence Day
"Information is the currency of democracy."
- Thomas Jefferson
"Knowledge is power."
- Thomas Hobbes
"The First Amendment was designed to protect offensive speech, because
nobody ever tries to ban the other kind."
- Mike Godwin, staff counsel, EFF
"In case you haven't heard, the Internet is not a superhighway."
- Bill Washburn, _Internet_World_, Feb. 1995
"The belief that enhanced understanding will necessarily stir a nation
to action is one of mankind's oldest illusions."
- Anonymous ('Hacker's Law')
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can
change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever does."
- Margaret Mead
"For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be
such a thing as superhuman law it is administered with subhuman
inefficiency."
- Eric Ambler
"...[S]ome starry eyed individuals who access the Net think of Cyberspace as
a community, with rules, regulations and codes of behaviour. Don't
you believe it! There is no community. Perhaps there was some truth in
that concept in the past, when the Internet was used exclusively by a small,
homogeneous group of academics and corporate technical researchers.
Today, with Internet access available to everyone, Iway travellers reflect
every heterogeneous nuance of the world population. Along your journey,
someone may try to tell you that in order to be a good Net "citizen", you
must follow the rules of the Cyberspace community. Don't listen. The only
laws and rules with which you should concern yourself are those passed by
the country, state and city in which you live. The only ethics you
should adopt as you pursue wealth on the Iway are those dictated by the
religious faith you have chosen to follow and your own good conscience."
- Laurence Canter & Martha Siegel ("the Green Card Lawyers"), from an early
review copy of their book, _How_To_Make_a_Fortune_on_the_Information_
_Superhighway_, 1994.
"Any time you throw information from the Internet at a student, you have
to filter it."
- Steve Shotwell, director of computer services for the Troy, Michigan
school district.
"Trying to control information in the network age is about as successful
as pissing into the wind."
- Keith Henson, in an article on the AABBS prosecution,
_Computer_underground_Digest_, Jan. 21, 1995.
"A means of control should exist whereby access operators and their
organizations are held responsible for what is posted on the Internet,"
- Church of Scientology lawyer Helena Kobrin, 1995.
"Knowledge itself is power."
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
"If a Nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization,
it expects what never was and never will be...if we are to guard against
ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be
informed."
- Thomas Jefferson
"I don't understand why they call it public broadcasting. As far as I am
concerned, there's nothing public about it; it's an elitist enterprise.
`Rush Limbaugh' is public broadcasting."
- Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich on the
de-funding of the Public Broadcasting System, as quoted by
_Broadcasting_and_Cable_, Feb. 20, 1995, p. 8
"The Internet is a conduit of criminal activity."
- James P. Lennane, president of software company DeScribe Inc., who in
Oct. 1994 offered a $20,000 reward for the turning in of certain software
pirates, whom Microsoft also offered a $10,000 bounty on.
"First of all, you have to make the distinction between the Internet
and some commercial service like AOL or Prodigy. If you spend that
time and money building internets, you at the end of your labors
will own tangible assets: hardware, software, paid-for network
bandwidth, and human capital in the form of people who know how to
run same. Spending those dimes on Prodigy means that in the end you
will have rented someone else's assets and will have nothing
concrete in the end except for receipts for bills paid."
- Edward Vielmetti of MSEN
"That will change over time the entire flow of information and the entire
quality of knowledge in the country and it will change the way people will
try to play games in the legislative process."
- Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, on
increasing public electronic access to Congressional Information
(as reported by _BNA_Daily_Report_for_Executives_, Nov. 22, 1994)
"John [Malone, of cable tv giant TCI] and I were just on a Networked
Economy Conference panel together, and we were standing at the urinals
talking about things, and Barry Diller comes in and stands between us. And
Barry says, `C'mon, you seem like such good friends. Just split the
difference.'"
- Bell Atlantic CEO Ray Smith, on the failed BA/TCI "NII" merger, reported
in _Wired_, Feb. 1995, p. 110
"...[D]on't mistake any of this for altruism...Fear and greed just doesn't
work. If you want to be successful, quality and service just works better."
- Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, on the company's improved customer service;
reported in _Investor's_Business_Daily_, Feb. 22, 1995, p. A2
"Networks are based on choice. When they get uncomfortable, it's easy to
opt out of them. Communities teach tolerance, co-existence, and mutual
respect...I fear that calling a network a community leads people to
complacency and delusion, to accepting an inadequate substitute because
they've never experienced the real thing and they don't know what they're
missing."
- Eric Utne, publisher of _Utne_Reader_, from _Utne_Reader_, Mar.-Apr.
1995, p. 3
"If I knew what you've made during the year, if I know what your withholding
is, if I know what your spending pattern is, I should be able to generate
for you a tax return. I am an excellent advocate of return-free filing. We
know everything about you that we need to know. Your employer tells us
everything about you that we need to know. Your activity records on your
credit cards tell us everything about you that we need to know. Through
interface with Social Security, with the DMV, with your banking
institutions, we really have a lot of information ... We could literally
file a return for you. This is the future we'd like to go to."
- US Internal Revenue Service Document Processing System project manager
Coleta Brueck, Computer Press Awards speech, April 15, 1994, as
reported by John Levine in _Privacy_Forum_Digest_
"I think intellectual property is more like land, and copyright violation
is more like trespass. Even though you don't take anything away from the
landowner when you trespass, most people understand and respect the laws
that make it illegal. The real crime in copyright violation is not the
making of the copies, it's the expropriation of the creator's right to
control the creation."
- Brad Templeton, Founder of ClariNet Communications Corp.,
_Internet_World_, Nov/Dec. 1994, p.64)
"E-mail someday will unite us all in a shared state of epistolary bliss.
E-mail is ethereal; it consumes no paper, no ink, and only a misting of
fossil fuels. E-mail is nearly instantaneous. Best of all, e-mail
combines the vacuity of phone talk with the potential permanence of
letters. A fledgling still, e-mail promises to burgeon beyond anyone's
calculation. Maybe the letter's golden age isn't dead after all; it may
be yet to come."
- an op-ed piece in the Nov. 9, 1994 _Wall_Street_Journal_
"Laws do not persuade just because they threaten."
- Seneca, 65 CE
"Nothing we do in this great capital can change the fact that factories
or information can flash across the world, that people can move money
around in the blink of an eye...Nothing can change the fact that
technology can be adopted, once created, by people all across the world
and then rapidly adapted in new and different ways by people who have
a little different take on the way that technology works."
- William Clinton, President of the United States, in a
_New_York_Times_ article by John Markoff, Sep. 21, 1993
[Note how inconsistent this statement is with the Clinton
Administration's policy efforts to stuff the encryption genie
back in the bottle.]
"The right to be heard does not include the right to be taken seriously."
- Hubert H. Humphrey
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive,
difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of
mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
- Gene Spafford, 1992, quoted in a Joel Snyder article in _Internet_World_,
Nov/Dec 1994, p.94
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin, _Historical_Review_of_Pennsylvania_, 1759.
"Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking,
honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the
publicity. But then, we elected them."
- Lily Tomlin
"Any vagabond babbler or unacknowledged genius, any enterprising tradesman,
with his own money or with the money of others, may found a newspaper,
even a great newspaper. He may attract a host of writers, ready to
deliver judgment on any subject at a moment's notice; he may hire
illiterate reporters to keep him supplied with rumors and scandals. His
staff is then complete. From that day he sits in judgement on all the
world, on ministers and administrators, on literature and art, on
finance and industry."
- K.P. Pobyedonostseff, _Reflections_of_a_Russian_Statesman_
(tr. Robert Long)
"I'd rather have 10% of the world than 100% of New England."
- President of Nynex, the New England local telephone monopoly, on
telecom deregulation, as reported in _Business_Week_, Feb. 20, 1995,
p. 92
"If you think the 13,000 guys at Microsoft who aren't millionaires yet are
going to show some restraint, you're in for a surprise."
- Andy Nicholson of Microsoft, in response to America Online CEO Steve
Case's comment that Microsoft should show some restraint in the online
service market.
"If I have a market in the U.S., I have 200 to 250 million guys all
speaking the same language, all paying in dollars, and all reading the
same magazines. The natural hub of the industry is the United States.
Whether the Japanese or the Europeans like to hear this or not, it's the
truth."
- Expatriate Belgian CEO of TechGnosis, a software company now based in
the US.
"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they
come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There is a First Amendment right to speak in a encrypted way...The right
to speak P.G.P. is like the right to speak Navajo. The Government has no
particular right to prevent you from speaking in a technical manner even if
it is inconvenient for them to understand."
- Eben Moglen, Columbia U. professor of law and legal history, in a
_New_York_Times_ article by John Markoff, Sep. 21, 1993
"The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status
quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest
pain is the pain of a new idea."
- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"Cyberspace still exists at the pleasure of the real world."
- Esther Dyson, EFF Boardmember, from Jan. 14. 1994 _Economist_ article
"Grassroots can grow through concrete."
- Jim DePoe <[email protected]>, as quoted in Jim Warren's
_GovAccess_ e-newsletter.
"Philosophical habits of mind do not come quicker through fiber optics.
Clear thinking is not aided by better dot resolution. Understanding
ourselves and feeling for others does not come with a software upgrade."
- Linda Ray Pratt
"When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so
regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for
us."
- Alexander Graham Bell
"[R]espondents [to an Internet survey] reported a more active civic life in
cyberspace than is typically reported by respondents in the national
election studies (NES) of Center for Political Studies of the University
of Michigan. Even though the technology is new, close to one-third
had used e-mail to contact a public official. This compares to an
estimated 28 percent of the NES who reported ever having written a
letter to a public official during the 1960 and 70s...About 60 percent had
been asked to petition or otherwise contact a public official about an
issue or public policy."
- Bonnie Fisher, Michael Margolis, David Resnick, "Democracy on the
Internet" Survey Results, as presented at the Annual Meeting of the
American Political Science Association in New York City, Sept. 1-4, 1994
"Knowledge of history is the precondition of political intelligence.
Without history, a society shares no common memory of where it has been
[or] what it core values are."
- 'National Standards for United States History' as reprinted in _Time_,
Nov. 7, 1994
"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of
tyranny is no virtue."
- Barry Goldwater
"When you are confronted by any complex social system, such as
an urban center or a hamster, with things about it that you're
dissatisfied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set
about fixing with much hope of helping...Jay Forrester has demonstrated
it mathematically, with his computer models of cities in which he makes
clear that whatever you propose to do, based on common sense, will almost
inevitably make matters worse rather than better. You cannot meddle with
one part of a complex system from the outside without the almost certain
risk of setting off disastrous events that you hadn't counted on in other,
remote parts. If you want to fix something you are first obliged to
understand, in detail, the whole system, and for very large systems you
can't do this without a very large computer. Even then, the safest course
seems to be to stand by and wring hands, but not to touch...Intervening is
a way of causing trouble."
- Lewis Thomas, from the essay "On Meddling", _The_Medusa_and_the_Snail_,
Viking Pr., New York, 1979
"I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my
country and betraying my freind, I hope I should have the guts to betray
my country."
- E. M. Forster
"One practice which I believe should be eliminated is that of the so-called
'paper front'. A client is advised to finance an 'organization' to
promote or fight for its cause under the guise of an independent and
spontaneous movement. This is a plain public deceit and fraud...Attempts
to fool the public by making it believe an 'organization' existing only
on paper is really a vociferous group favoring this or that cause have
helped to cast a shadow upon the business of public relations counseling."
- John W. Hill, _The_Making_of_a_Public_Relations_Man_
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of
chains and slavery!?"
- Patrick Henry
"The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because
of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be
human."
- John Naisbitt & Patricia Aburdene, _Megatrends_2000_
"In a Time/CNN poll of 1,000 Americans conducted last week by Yankelovich
Partners, two-thirds said it was more important to protect the privacy of
phone calls than to preserve the ability of police to conduct wiretaps.
When informed about the Clipper Chip, 80% said they opposed it."
- Philip Elmer-Dewitt, "Who Should Keep the Keys", _TIME_, Mar. 14 1994
[note: these statistics have since been called into question. Even so,
they are unlikely to be off by very MUCH...]
"Many thanks to those of you who flamed the PC [Progressive Conservative
party] pranksters. I know when I went online that I would have to deal
with fake posts and related chaff. That's the price of being on the Net.
I'm not about to delete my account. I still want to hear from people with
*real* concerns and *real* suggestions".
- Robert Rae, Premier of Ontario, Canada, in a post to the Usenet newsgroup
ont.general, thanking supporters for verbally attacking PC party leader
Mike Harris (who referred to an obviously forged message from a fake Bob
Rae as an embarassing "security violation") and the forgers themselves.
From a K.K. Campbell article in _eye_Weekly_. [If major figures of
government are encouraging flaming, netiquette still has a long way to
go...]
"Time makes more converts than reason."
- Thomas Paine
"A Gallup poll reveals nearly 85% of Canadians worry the info-highway
will be a threat to their privacy, but 54.9% are still willing
to pay up to $15 monthly to be hooked into it. The info-highway
received a 54% recognition rating, a figure described as "astounding"
by Anderson Consulting, which sponsored the survey. 58.7% were
interested in educational services, but only 21.3% in home shopping
and 16.4% in calling up video games."
- _Globe_&_Mail_, "Snoopophobia Haunts Info-Highway" May 3, 1994
"Maybe we need a tax credit for the poorest Americans to buy a laptop. Now,
maybe that's wrong, maybe that's expensive, maybe we can't do it, but I'll
tell you, any signal that we can send to the poorest Americans that says,
'We're going into a 21st century, third-wave information age, and so are
you, and we want to carry you with us.'"
- Rep. Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House of Representatives addressing
the House Ways and Means Committee, Jan. 1995. [From _New_York_Times_,
Jan. 5, 1995, excerpted in _Edupage_, Jan. 8, 1995.]
"Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping
tom to install your window blinds."
- John Perry Barlow, EFF co-founder, _Decrypting_the_Puzzle_Palace_
"Only through intelligent utilization of interactive multimedia technology
can we make higher education simultaneously more productive and more
efficient."
- Bernard Gifford, software entrepreneur, quoted in _Educom_Review_, Nov./
Dec., 1994
"California legislators consider 10 to 15 letters and faxes to be a
*strong* showing of support for a bill (in a state of 31-million population!)"
- Jim Warren, _GovAccess_ Internet newsletter, 08/04/94
"It is almost impossible for anyone outside this damn beltway to really
understand how the Congress works. If you aren't here, walking the halls
of Congress, sitting at bars and attending parties where you get to knock
back some brews with Hill staffers, you don't have a handle on the
almost numbing amount of bullshit that goes on."
- _CWD_ and _Comm_Daily_ journalist Brock Meeks, post to com-priv mailing
list forum, 10/22/94
"'If you want me to tell you that our money buys us a vote on a particular
bill at a particular time, I say: `Fuck You,` it doesn't,' according to a
prominent lobbyist for one of the regional telephone companies.
"'However, if you ask me, `Do we get better access because of a couple of
$1,000 checks?` I'll guarantee you that two grand gets us in the door and
gets our telephone calls returned before Joe Blow from the home office,' he
said. 'And it sure as hell gets our calls returned before yours.'"
- Brock Meeks, _CyberWire_Dispatch_, 2nd issue of 11/08/94
"There are at least four big barriers to the NII. One is outdated and
compartmentalized regulations governing telecommunication, cable
broadcasting, and information industries. Another is legal issues
concerning copyright, intellectual property, and security. The third is
standards and the interoperability of the various NII technologies. And the
last is the development of new structures for commerce and business
activities on the NII, including billing and payment for services
rendered,"
- president of WilTel, Inc., as reported in _Telecommunications_, Nov.
1994, p. 29
"It's amazing where capitalism has boomed in the last couple of years.
First the Eastern Bloc, and now the last bastion of socialism -- the
Internet itself."
- the Chairman of Delphi Internet Services Corp., as reported by
_Information_Week_, 10/24/94
"E-mail is reincarnating the age of letter writing. We're keeping in touch
the way the Victorians did, building a personal community connected by a
constant stream of letters sharing news and gossip. E-mail is reviving the
'letter' as a forum for wit, style, and personality, as well as serving as
an invaluable business tool."
- Leslie Schroeder, Silicon Valley PR consultant to high-tech companies,
from _Computer_underground_Digest interview by David Batterson, Oct.
1994
"Every advance in civilization has been denounced while it was still recent."
- Bertrand Russell
"[If] America's tv and movie producers are unwilling to clean up their
act... when it comes to sex, bloodshed and violence in their programming...
the government stands ready to step in."
- Attorney-General Janet Reno at a 1993 Senate hearing on tv violence,
as reported by a UPI radio report. [One is tempted to ask what the
difference between 'bloodshed' and 'violence' is...]
"Not all dinosaurs roll over and die. Some of 'em can run real fast and
bite the hell out of you."
- a Meridian Bancorp senior vice president on banking industry's plans to
prevent Microsoft's online services from cutting into their industry.
From _Business_Week_, 10/31/94.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
- Arthur C. Clarke
"If five years from now we [the FBI] solve the access problem, but
what we're hearing is all encrypted, I'll probably, if I'm still here, be
talking about that in a very different way: the objective is the same.
The objective is for us to get those conversations whether they're by an
alligator clip or ones and zeros. Whoever they are, whatever they are, I
need them."
- FBI Director Louis Freeh, clarifying statements that the FBI may seek
legislation to ban strong encryption, in an Sept. 1994 Q&A session,
from a WELL article by Steven Levy.
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in
human history--with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila."
- Mitch Ratcliffe, _Technology Review_, April, 1992
"People need to buy and want to. The selling itself becomes the
entertainment, the sought-after good... In the Internet world there won't
be any other way to peddle. To be successful advertising itself will have
to supply real value to the consumer."
- Peter Huber, telecommunication attorney, quoted in _Forbes_, 12/19/94
"It's kind of the digital equivalent of a drive-by shooting."
- a Texas A&M U. professor whose email account was abused by crackers
who publicly posted racist remarks from the account, resulting in
hatemail (including death threats) being sent to the professor.
(Reported by _Atlanta_Journal_Constitution_, 10/19/94)
"The hottest news in computing today is online communications, and there's
no end in sight to the impact this will have on virtually every segment of the
American public."
- Practical Peripherals president Jack Murphy, from _Computer_underground_
_Digest_ interview by David Batterson, Oct. 1994. Batterson comments:
"Irontically, Murphy's remarks were faxed to me, not e-mailed."
"The net poses a fundamental threat not only to the authority of the
government, but to all authority, because it permits people to organize,
think, and influence one another without any institutional supervision
whatsoever. The government is responding to this threat with the Clipper
Chip...The obvious danger in supplying people with encryption is that
encryption makes it easier to keep secrets, which makes it easier for
people to commit crimes. With powerful encryption, the net would become an
ideal place for criminals to organize conspiracies."
- John Seabrook, "My First Flame", _New_Yorker_ 06/06/94
"It [the 'set-top box'] will allow us to control all the communication
needs of a household with one device."
- John Mallone, Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI) C.E.O.
"Taxpayers have spent more than $200 billion in the last decade on
computer systems that are antiquated, incompatible, and not doing the job."
- Sen. William Cohen (R-Maine), on misappropriations for, and misuse of
obsolete computer systems by government agencies (from _Information_
_Week_, 10/24/94). Ever get the feeling the govt. is differently clued?
"I doubt that Congress would pass on the opportunity to make sure that our
children were safe from terrorists."
- FBI Director Louis Freeh using one of the main propaganda buggaboos of
law enforcement attempts to weaken US privacy rights ("drug dealers",
"child pornographers/molestors" and "organized crime" being the other 3
Horsemen of the Big Brother Apocalypse); from House testimony at a
hearing on the FBI's Digital Telephony bill, 09/13/94.
"The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing
power, and more sophisticated techniques used by establishment mass media
to falsify, misrepresent, misquote, rule out of consideration as a priori
ridiculous, or simply ignore and blot out of existence: data, books,
discoveries that they consider prejudicial to establishment interest..."
- William S. Burroughs, author (censored by the U.S. government; his
comments apply now to the underground e-press as well)
"What I believe we lack, as a nation, is something which describes our
rights in an information age. I believe that the principles are all
there, in our constitution. But I shudder to think what the courts will
do to massacre these unless the legislature re-articulates these
principles in terms more appropriate to contemporary technology."
- Sean McLinden <[email protected]>, post to Com-Priv mailing list forum
"To some, this is outrageous. To some, this is free speech in action."
- Cliff Figallo (former EFF Online Coordinator, and former WELL Director)
on the advent of anonymous remailers on the Internet
"If the future navigation system [for interactive networked services on
the NII] looks like something from Microsoft, it will never work."
- the chairman of Walt Disney Television & Telecommunications, at Broadcas-
ting & Cable magazine's Superhighway Superpanel (reported by B&C,
10/10/94)
"Ask the American public if they want an FBI Wiretax and they'll say 'no.'
If you ask them do they want a feature on their phone that helps the FBI find
their missing child they'll say, 'Yes.'"
- FBI Directory Louis Freeh, on Digital Telephony, US House (Subcmte. on
Telecommunications & Finance) hearing on the Digital Telephony bill,
09/13/94). [Considering that the first question is fairly accurate,
and the second is a wildly misleading attempt to convert real issues
into emotionally charged buzzphrases and grossly inaccurate depictions
of how this technology works, Freeh's estimation of the answers is
probably correct.]
"Describing the Internet as the Network of Networks is like calling
the Space Shuttle, a thing that flies"
- John Lester of Mass. General Hospital (from his email signature file).
"In 1991, the latest year figures are available, most Americans, across all
age groups, disapproved when asked the question: 'Everything considered,
would you say that you approve or disapprove of wiretapping?' Some 67% of
all 18-20 year olds gave the thumbs down, as did 68% of the Gen[eration]-X
crowd...Boomers disapproved of wiretapping almost 3-to-1 while 67% of
those 50 and over disapproved."
- Brock Meeks, "Riding A Straw Horse", _CyberWire_Dispatch_, reporting
on innacurate FBI figures presented at House Telecom. & Finance Subcmte.
Hearing on Digital Telephony legislation, 09/13/94.
"Finally, sometime in the near future--thanks to massive computerization of
automobile traffic control--safety on the roads will match the airline
safety of today, with relatively few car accidents and deaths per year.
It's going to be very exciting..."
- David Batterson, "The Online Future", _Computer_underground_Digest_,
Oct. 24, 1994
"I believe in markets doing what they do well, which is to develop technology,
and letting citizens do what they ideally do well, which is to set policy."
- Esther Dyson, opening statements from NII Advisory Council session, 1994.
"Frankly, the people probably most interested in having computer lists on disk
are junk mail vendors and solicitors."
- Karen Hughes, spokesperson for George Bush Jr. (R) Texas gubernatorial
campaign, on why Bush refused to follow other candidates in providing
online copies of files documenting campaign contributions and
expenditures (as reported by _Houston_Chronicle_, 07/21/94).
"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion"
- Edmund Burke
"The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of
true liberty."
- James Madison, 4th US President
"We were extremely conscious of free speech rights. But they are not
absolute."
- John E. Palomino, Santa Rosa CA Regional Director, Dept. of Education
Office for Civil Rights, on Branham, Arata & Humphrey v. Santa Rosa
Junior College case. From "College Settles Harassment Charges
Stemming from Computer Conferences", Tamar Lewin, _New_York_Times_,
09/22/94
"Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might
dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they
were bound to get you."
- George Orwell, _1984_
"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe
to be unpopular."
- Adlai Stevenson
"When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl!"
[When cryptography is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy!", ROT-13
encrypted]
- Brad Templeton of ClariNet
"Wherever the Net arises, there arises also a rebel to resist human
control...A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures
don't happen as often. It is...fertile ground for learning, adaptation,
and evolution...The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or
unguided learning, is a network. All other topologies limit what
can happen."
- Kevin Kelly, _Out_of_Control_
"In order to keep up with the criminals and to protect our national
security, the solution is clear: we need legislation to ensure that
telephone companies and other carriers provide law enforcement with access
to this new technology."
- FBI Dir. Louis Freeh, 12/8/93, on hampering new telecom technology
to make it easily wiretappable. [Full text of this Dec. 1993 DC Press
Club speech available for anonymous ftp as wiretap.speech from
ftp.eff.org in /pub/EFF/Privacy/Surveillance/Old/digtel93_freeh.speech]
"[Digital Telephony] compared to the Clipper Chip, is relatively benign,
but that's like saying cholera is better than the plague."
- Carl Rudijerian
"It's time for a reality check. These products are a little more difficult
to develop than people thought."
- a Bell Atlantic management official, on NII technology (quoted in
_New_York_Times_, 09/09/94).
"The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties
through the automation, integration, and interconnection of many
small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may
seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable."
- U.S. Privacy Protection Study Commission, 1977
"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough
to take it all away."
- Barry Goldwater
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home."
- Ken Olsen, then president of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), 1977.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be
violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, support
by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be
searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
- Amendment IV, United States Constitution [Amazingly, the US House of
Representatives voted this language down when it was inserted in a
1995 bill by a crafty legislator, to replace unconstitutional
language proposed by another. Apparently, few in the House
recognized this as the Fourth Amendment. One Representative even
whined that it gutted the whole bill.]
"I used to feel like I was a flea on the back of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Now I
feel I might be a small yapping poodle on the back of a Tyrannosaurus Rex."
- Phil Zimmerman, on releasing "Pretty Good Privacy" (PGP)
"Information wants to be free."
- Stewart Brand, EFF boardmember emeritus, founder of Whole Earth Catalog
and the WELL. [Among others. No telling who really said this
first, but Brand's is the earliest reference I find. The full version
is: "Information wants to be free - because it is now so easy to copy
and distribute casually - and information wants to be expensive -
because in an Information Age, nothing is so valuable as the right
information at the right time." Quite a bit more balanced than the
anti-intellectual-property rallying cry "information wants to be free"
is sometimes misused as.]
"Information wants to be free. Believe it."
- Bruce Sterling, author and EFF-Austin boardmember
"But programmers and authors want to get paid."
- source unknown
"Recently, we have witnessed an alarming number of young people
who, for a variety of sociological and psychological reasons, have
become attached to their computers and are exploiting their potential
in a criminal manner. Often, a progression of criminal activity occurs
which involves telecommunications fraud (free long distance phone
calls), unauthorized access to other computers (whether for profit,
fascination, ego, or the intellectual challenge), credit card fraud (cash
advances and unauthorized purchases of goods), and then move on to
other destructive activities like computer viruses...Our experience shows
that many computer hacker suspects are no longer misguided teenagers
mischievously playing games with their computers in their bedrooms. Some
are now high tech computer operators using computers to engage in unlawful
conduct."
- Garry M. Jenkins, Asst. Director, U. S. Secret Service
"We empower eachother by sharing information...We can create here,
together, a society in which everyone has a voice, and everybody's ideas
are heard."
- Sheila Lennon, "The Global Village is Finally Wired",
_Providence_[RI]_Sunday_Journal_, 08/07/94
"Privacy in one's associations ... may in many circumstances be
indispensable to freedom of association, particularly where a group
espouses dissident beliefs."
- John M. Harlan, Supreme Court justice, 1958
"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's
whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is
the process of setting man free from men."
- Ayn Rand, _The_Fountainhead_, 1943
"Earlier this month...America Online..shut several feminist discussion
forums, saying it was concerned that the subject matter might be
inappropriate for young girls who would see the world 'girl' in the
forum's headline and 'go in there looking for information about their
Barbies,' a spokeswoman said."
- Peter H. Lewis, "Censors Become a Force on Cyberspace Frontier",
_New_York_Times_, 06/07/94
"It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values -- the charming little
clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its
own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is
in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't
break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on
the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle."
- John Updike. _Atlantic_Monthly_, 09/94
"While we bemoan the decline of literacy, computers discount words in favor
of pictures and pictures in favor of video. While we fret about the
decreasing cogency of public debate, computers dismiss linear argument and
promote fast, shallow romps across the information landscape. While we
worry about basic skills, we allow into the classroom software that will do
a student's arithmetic or correct his spelling."
- David Gelerntner, Yale U., _New_Republic_, 09/26/94
"Cryptography is an enormously powerful tool that needs to be controlled,
just as we control bombs and rockets."
- David A. Lytel, President's Office of Science and Technology Policy
"Society has recognized over time that certain kinds of scientific inquiry
can endanger society as a whole and has applied either directly, or through
scientific/ethical constraints, restrictions on the kind and amount of
research that can be done in those areas."
- Adm. Bobby R. Inman (then CIA Dep. Dir.) in a February, 1982 article for
_Aviation_Week_and_Space_Technology_ on why cryptographic research should
be limited to government scientists.
"You know your country is dying when you have to make a distinction between
what is moral and ethical, and what is legal."
- John De Armond <[email protected]>, _Performance_Engineering_Magazine_, 1994
"This is the snobbery of the people on the Mayflower looking down
their noses at the people who came over ON THE SECOND BOAT!"
- EFF co-founder Mitch Kapor, on Internet-user elitism v. BBS users
"Within a cell site, LE officers ... use triangulation equipment to zero in
on a particular caller['s physical location]...cellular tracking is
extremely beneficial, it's an investigative tool of the future."
- Michael Guidry, of the Guidry Group, Houston, TX, security consultants;
from "Fugitive relied on and was undone by cellular phone", _LA_Times_,
06/19/94
"There is a very real and critical danger that unrestrained public
discussion of cryptologic matters will seriously damage the ability of this
government to conduct signals intelligence and the ability of this
government to carry out its mission of protecting national security
information from hostile exploitation."
- Admiral Bobby Ray Inman (then Director of the NSA) in a public speech in
March 1979.
"It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use
and authority of reason as to administer medication to the dead."
- Thomas Jefferson
"Inman seemed to regard real, virile encryption to be something rather
like a Saturday Night Special. 'My answer,' he said, 'would be
legislation which would make it a criminal offense to use encrypted
communication to conceal criminal activity.'
"Wouldn't that render all encrypted traffic automatically suspect? I
asked.
"'Well,' he said, 'you could have a registry of institutions which can
legally use ciphers. If you get somebody using one who isn't registered,
then you go after him.'"
- from John Perry Barlow's "Decrypting the Puzzle Palace",1992 [available
online as ftp.eff.org, /pub/EFF/Policy/Crypto/decrypting_puzzle.palace].
"The more people use computers, the more they find ways to abuse things."
- Rick Sigurdson, IRS investigator & chairman of Federal Computer
Investigations Committee (from AP Wire story "Policing Cyberspace", by
Ted Anthony)
"Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix."
- Former US President Harry S. Truman on clandestine government; from
_Plain_Speaking:_An_Oral_Biography_of_Harry_S._Truman_," Merle Miller,
1974, ch. 23
"The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man
living with power to endanger the public liberty."
- John Adams, "Notes for an Oration at Braintree", 1772
"Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to
maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of
the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our
utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance. Let
us remember that 'if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our
liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.' It is a
very serious consideration that millions yet unborn may be the
miserable sharers of the event."
- Samuel Adams ("patriot, statesman, brewer"), speech, 1771
"Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse."
- Rousseau, "The Social Contract," 1762
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in
its abuses."
- Andrew Jackson, Veto of the Bank Bill, 1832
"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the
people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise
that control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from
them, but to inform their discretion."
- Thomas Jefferson, 1820. [Another version has been spotted that runs
like this: "I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of
society but the people. And if we think them not enlightened enough,
the remedy is not to take power from them, but to inform them by
education."]
"I still believe, in spite of the level of public inanity in this country,
that people are going to look very unkindly on a scheme to put a government-
mandated flap into the seats of their longjohns."
- Matthew Mckenzie <[email protected]>, alt.privacy post about Clipper
"Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy."
- Orson Welles
"The defendant's objections to the evidence obtained by wire-tapping must,
in my opinion, be sustained. It is, of course, immaterial where the
physical connection with the telephone wires leading into the defendant's
premises was made. And it is also immaterial that the intrusion was in aid
of law enforcement. Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to
protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to
freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by
evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious
encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
- Justice Louis D. Brandeis, dissenting, Olmstead v. United States,
277 U.S. 479 (1928)
"Some folks have been saying recently, the real message is not so
much content at this point but: 'What do we want? BANDWIDTH! When do we
want it? NOW!!' 500,000 people on the Capitol steps should do it."
- Richard Civille (DC Dir., Center for Civic Networking), nii_agenda
mailing list post, 02/23/94
"Don't hate the media. Become the media."
- Jello Biafra [formerly of the band Dead Kennedys. Successfully fought
an attempt to prosecute him, the group, and various record distributors
over the inclusion of an allegedly obscene miniposter by Swiss master
surrealist painter, H. R. Giger, in one of their albums.]
[The Clipper Chip scheme] "is a focal point for the distrust of goverment."
- Clinton Brooks, NSA scientist who led the Clipper Chip project,
_Wall_Street_Journal_ interview, 02/22/94. [No kidding, Clint.]
"I've been asked to explain why I don't worry much about the topics of
privacy threat...One reason is that these scenarios seem to assume that
there will be large, monolithic bureaucracies...that are capable of
harnessing computers for one-way surveillance of an unsuspecting
populace. I've come to feel that computation just doesn't work that
way. Being afraid of monolithic organizations especially when they have
computers, is like being afraid of really big gorillas especially when
they are on fire."
- Bruce Sterling, remarks on commercial use of private information,
at Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference IV, Chicago IL, Mar. 26,
1994. [full transcript available at ftp.eff.org,
/pub/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/cfp94_sterling.speech]
"Behind all the hype shaping the electronic highway are corporate
interests. These huge companies are doing the most natural thing
in the world to them; following their own corporate interest."
- Herber Schiller, "Information Superhighway: Paving Over the Public",
Z Magazine, March 1994
"A trickle-up model for the new information economy could be effective with
the proper filters (our own). Ideas bubbling up instead of homogenizing
memes raining down."
- Scott Marshall, from FringeWare mailing list commentary, March 14, 1994
"The FBI wanted us to introduce the [1994 Digital Telephony] bill today and I
said absolutely not. They have to understand they have a Vermonter as the
Chairman Of the [Technology and Law] committee and that we Vermonters
respect our privacy."
- Sen. Patrick Leahy, from James Bandler, "Eavesdropping Measure is
Troubling to Leahy", _Rutland_Herald_, Mar. 27, 1994. Throughout
1994, Sen. Leahy worked with EFF to strip the FBI's privacy-threatening
"features" from the Digital Telephony bill and replace them with new
privacy protections.
"Clipper is like a requirement that house keys be 'escrowed' with the
local police, or that all photos processed at the local drugstore be
double-printed, with copies sent to the local 'Photo Escrow Center.'
After all, how else can we catch child pornographers and other 'bad
guys'?...And what about those curtains that 'encrypt' the visible contents of
houses under surveillance?...Perhaps we need 'approved curtains'...And
what about the many crimes people confess in their diaries?...Surely many
crimes could be stopped if diaries, journals, and personal letters could be
'escrowed'--with suitable safeguards, of course, to ensure that only
legitimate inspections were done (for example, J. Edgar Hoover's need
to inspect diaries to find salacious sexual material).
"Some may call me 'shrill' for citing the above points. I don't think
so. We are at a kind of cusp in history, where privacy can either be
secured through strong crypto--despite the crimes that may go
undetected or unpunished because of this--or privacy can be handed
over to others to protect or not protect as they see fit."
- Timothy C. May <[email protected]>, Usenet post to talk.politics.crypto,
Apr. 13, 1994
"If you say to people that they, as a matter of fact, can't protect their
conversations, in particular their political conversations, I think you
take a long step toward making a transition from a free society to a
totalitarian society."
- Whitfield Diffie of Sun Microsystems, world renowned cryptographer,
"MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour", Thursday, 4/7/94
"There are no bad haircuts in cyberspace."
- Dave Barry
"On the Internet nobody knows you are a dog, but they sure know if you are a
son-of-a-bitch."
- Steve Cisler, Apple Computer
"Speaking or writing in forms not readily understandable to
your enemies, your neighbors, your spouse, the cops, or your local
eavesdropper is as old as humanity."
- Timothy C. May <[email protected]>, Usenet post to talk.politics.misc,
Apr. 12, 1994
"How do we reconcile the promise of a new high-speed national medium with
the threat of a far-reaching, nationwide surveillance network, as
foreshadowed by the Clipper chip scheme and the draft Digital Telephony
bill? Isn't sacrificing privacy to make policework easier a threat to the
principles this nation was founded upon?"
- Stanton McCandlish <[email protected]>, EFF Online Activist, question posed to
panellists at NII Public Interest Summit, Washington DC, Mar. 29, 1994
"Activism is the killer app for the net."
- Steven Cherry <[email protected]>, .signature file (email footer).
"The part that frightens the hell out of me is the goverment deciding where
technology goes."
- Senator Patrick Leahy, on the FBI's proposed Digital Telephony
surveillance legislation, in "Proposed wiretap law set off debate over
Justice role", Kevin Power, _Government_Computer_News, Apr. 10, 1994
"Everybody has a different Internet."
- author Bruce Sterling, from EFF-Austin BoD minutes, Apr. 12, 1994
"But groundless hope, like unconditional love, is the only kind worth having."
- EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow, "Cynthia Horner's Eulogy", Apr. 1994
"In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910
and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in
Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next
week in Japan."
- Travel writer Paul Theroux in "The Kingdom By the Sea"
"Our fear of technology is really a fear of empowerment. We now have the
ability to design the reality we live in, and we have to step up to the
occasion."
- Douglas Rushkoff, author of _Cyberia_, 1994
"Europe is opposed to the Clipper chip because it fears that the FBI or
CIA could target European businesses...The global censorship plan has run
up against opposition from European and American businesses that use
encryption to send sensitive information. In a position paper to a
consulate of European Union intelligence experts...the European organisation
representing users of computer security has rejected the Clinton initiative
as 'totally unacceptable'...the Information Security Business Advisory Group
(Ibag), warns European governments to ignore overtures from the US government
aimed at restricting access to the information superhighway to users who
use encryption that the government agencies can decode."
- UK _Independent_ article, "Spooks all set to hack it on the
superhighway", Mar. 5 1994
"There happened in the Middle Ages what has happened so often
since then. Those who were the beneficiaries of the established
order were bent on defending it, not so much, perhaps, because
it guaranteed their interests, as because it seemed to them
indispensable to the preservation of society."
- Henri Pirenne, _Medieval_Cities,_Their_Origins_and_the_Revival_of_Trade_,
1925
"I like having a machine called 'elvis' on the network because
that way, I can say 'ping elvis' and have it come back with 'elvis is
alive'."
- Carl Shipley, overheard at the Usenix/LISA V Conference, San Diego,
CA, 1991
"The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public
against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield
juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general
welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig...The incidence
of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to
reading only what is fit for children."
- US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Butler v. Michigan, 352
U.S. 380, 383 (1957)
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes
me to tremble for the safety of my country.... Corporations have been
enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the
money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working
upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few
hands and the Republic is destroyed."
- Former US President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 (letter to Col.
William F. Elkins; printed in "The Lincoln Encyclopedia", ed. Archer
H. Shaw, Macmillan, 1950, NY)
"Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship."
- Former US President Harry S. Truman
"1. Freedom of assembly and association as well as speech, press and all other
forms of expression are guaranteed. 2. No censorship shall be maintained,
nor shall the secrecy of any means of communication be violated."
- Article 21, Constitution of Japan [in translation, of course.]
"All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights.
Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring,
possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety,
happiness, and privacy."
- Article 1, Section 1, Constitution of the State of California, USA
"Did you learn how to think or how to believe?"
- father of consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who asked the young Nader
this while questioning him on what he had learned in school one day.
Nader describes this as a seminal event in leading him to become a
critic of corporate and government policies. (From an interview with
Ralph Nader by David Barsamian)
"People think I watch TV too much, but they are wrong. There is a
huge difference between merely "watching" TV and learning to respond
aggressively to it. The difference, for most people, is the difference
between the living and dying of their own brains."
- Hunter S. Thompson in "Better than Sex" (1994).
"Democracy is not a spectator sport."
- anonymous
"Yeah, but a republic is."
- Glenn Busbin _GovAccess_ e-bulletin, 1995.
"Yes, but then the bulls gore the audience."
- Jim Warren, _GovAccess_ e-bulletin, July 31, 1995.
"There are a lot of dumb people with powerful tools."
- Jonah Seiger, 1994 then CDT Program Coordinator (former EFF Program
Coordinator; now of Mindshare Internet Campaigns as of 1998)
"this is one of the least mature postings i've seen in awhile. is eff so
bored?" [sic]
- Matt Marx, commenting on the EFF Quotes Collection.
Postscript on the enterprise of collecting quotes:
"I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread
that binds them is my own."
- Montaigne
"Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly."
- Simeon Strunsky
"The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit."
- W. Somerset Maugham
Post-postscript on the enterprise of generating quotable quotes:
"A witty saying proves nothing."
- Voltaire
</pre></body></html>
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