Richard Stallman

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

A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness not necessarily with computers. The programmers in the old MIT free software community of the 60s and 70s referred to themselves as hackers. Around 1980 journalists who discovered the hacker community mistakenly took the term to mean security breaker.

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

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

People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.

The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way.

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

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

Whether gods exist or not, there is no way to get absolute certainty about ethics. Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can.

Sharing knowledge is the most fundamental act of friendship. Because it is a way you can give something without loosing something.

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

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

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

The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part.

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

If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not enough - you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal.

I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.

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

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

Programming is not a science. Programming is a craft.

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

The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non fiction. This practice was useful and is the only way many authors works have survived even in part.

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

Android is very different from the GNU/Linux operating system because it contains very little of GNU. Indeed, just about the only component in common between Android and GNU/Linux is Linux, the kernel.

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

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

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

If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.

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

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

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