A lot of people collect quotes that sound like they were said by very courageous people, or people worthy of respect for some other trait, but the actions of these courageous talkers often don't match up to their great words. This is particularly true of quotes by ex-presidents, whose actions have been forgotten. I've tried to avoid quotes from such people.
"I trust Stallman. I don't like his haircut but what under it is
OK."
-Per Funk, a comment made in signing Bruce Perens' boycott-Novell
letter.
"Berlusconi the pacifist? ... He wants the wine bottle full, the wife
drunk, and the money in his wallet."
-Marco Rizzo, Italian MEP, commenting on
Silvio Berlusconi's re-election campaign claim that he was in fact never in
favour of the Iraq invasion.
"This obsession people seem to have with democracy is silly. Do
doctors and nurses in the operating room vote on how to proceed with an
operation? Should pilots ask for a vote on how to land a plane?"
-a
comment attached to a Slashdot story with an unnecessarily provocative
title "GPL 3.0 Rewrite Drive Is No Democracy"
"All that for that"
-Mark MacGann, pro-software-patent campaigner, on hearing the
European Parliament voting to reject the Software Patents directive.
"There are much better ways to open a discussion than throwing a brick
through the window."
-Danny Thorpe, about people
complaining on Slashdot before contacting the person causing their
problem
"I felt like putting a bullet in the eye of every panda that wouldn't
screw to save its species."
-Fight Club
"I don't consider myself a pessimist at all. I think of a pessimist as
someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel completely soaked to the
skin."
- Leonard Cohen, The
Daily Telegraph interview, 1993
Mlk: "Emacs can work as a text editor? How do I enable that
feature?"
DShard: "ctrl-meta-c k meta-p 1 1 ctrl-v shake it all about, you do the
hockey pokey and turn yourself around. AFAIK that's what it's all
about"
-slashdot
conversation
"Using marketing as a justification of cost always makes me laugh:
"Our product costs you a lot because it costs us a lot to persuade you
to buy it""
-anonymous post to NewsForge
"For if a thing is not diminished by being shared with others, it is
not rightly owned if it is only owned and not shared"
-Aurelius
Augustinus (354-430)
"Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose."
-Often
mis-attributed to Stallman
"[Charlie] McCreevy is a right winger who believes in incentives
- tax breaks and hand outs for the wealthy and a kick in arse for the
poor."
-Proinsias De
Rossa
"There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship."
-Ralph Nader
"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it
ceases to be serious when people laugh."
-George Bernard
Shaw
"When everyone can possess every intellectual work of beauty and utility - reaping all the human value of it, every increase of knowledge - at the same cost that any one person can possess them, it is no longer moral to exclude."
"If you're a capitalist and you have the best goods and they're free, you don't have to proselytize, you just have to wait."
"Everybody is connected to everybody else, all data that can be shared will be shared will be shared: get used to it."
"The patent law is inherently contradictory. When somebody says ``I am a free market capitalist, and that is why I believe in the free patent law'' - that is to say that government should decide what is a good idea, should decide who had the idea, and that for 20 years no one else is allowed to use the idea unless they pay for it."
"Without hydraulic despotism and the divine right kingship of the pharaoh, we will underproduce pyramids. Now, we've been underproducing pyramids for three thousand years, and pyramids are beautiful but it isn't hurting us."
"The process of excluding people now has competition: it's called including people; and including people works better."
"it was never about 'open', it's about 'free'"
"Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone."
"If you make decisions about software - or anything - based solely on short-term cost and benefit, someone with a longer view can easily manoeuver you into a trap from which it is hard to escape."
"In most cases, the user of proprietary software is expected to promise not to share with anyone else. It's wrong to make that agreement, wrong to keep it if you have made it, and especially wrong to lure someone else into making such a promise."
"This is the free software movement. The idea that we should avoid mentioning "free software" is always unacceptable; no matter what reasons might be offered, they are not good enough."
"Well, I hope they like symbolism, 'cause the won't get any
substance!"
[on hearing that G. W. Bush had annouced Iraqi's
would be paid to demolish Abu Ghraib
prison.]
"Sometimes, if you push too hard, you end up pushing yourself back
instead of hurting your adversary."
[On how much version 3 of the
GPL can do to fight software patents.]
"Injustice is happening now; suffering is happening now. We have choices to make now. To insist on absolute certainty before starting to apply ethics to life decisions is a way of choosing to be amoral."
"The awareness that I have had some success in campaigning for freedom is the greatest reward I can imagine having in life." -from a discussion on Questions please...
(Go: homepage of Ciarán O'Riordan)
I made these buttons, except the first one. Please copy, improve, and redistribute them!
Copyright 2005 Ciaran O'Riordan. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.