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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Programming is not a science. Programming is a craft.

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

You look at the whole Human Rights questions, I happened to be there at just the right time when the country was awakening - this goes to the first question you asked - the whole country was awakening to a hundred years of injustice that hadn't been resolved yet.

To me, a feminist belongs in the same category as a humanist or an advocate for human rights. I don't see why someone who's a feminist should be thought of differently.

There are two things that I put my focus on. One is the fight against AIDS and finding a cure. The other is human rights.

I have great confidence in the universal value and in basic human rights and I have great confidence that referenda will eventually take root and become part of our daily lives in Taiwan.

When we criticize in Iran the actions of the government, the fundamentalists say that we and the Bush Administration are in the same camp. The funny thing is that human rights activists and Mr. Bush can never be situated in the same group.

The issue of human rights is one of the most fundamental human issues and also one of the most sensitive and controversial.

Our country, like every modern state, needs profound democratic reforms. It needs political and ideological pluralism, a mixed economy and protection of human rights and the opening up of society.

Liberty, freedom and democracy are very fuzzy words, but human rights is very specific.

It may be an extreme example brought about by abnormal circumstances - but the criteria of human rights kick in, surely, precisely when the conditions are extreme and the situation is abnormal.

The United Nations has a critical role to play in promoting stability, security, democracy, human rights, and economic development. The UN is as relevant today as at any time in its history, but it needs reform.

Our strategic dialogue with China can both protect American interests and uphold our principles, provided we are honest about our differences on human rights and other issues and provided we use a mix of targeted incentives and sanctions to narrow these differences.

The idea of human rights as a fundamental principle can be seen to underlie throughout Islamic teachings.

The UN declaration on human rights must always be first in line before religion or other cultural habits, in case of any conflict between them.

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

We all would like to see a brighter future for Haiti, and I hope this conference will serve to explore many views. Respect for human rights, freedom, and the rule of law must be established in the poorest nation in our hemisphere.

The E.U. is more than just a trade organization or a common market; it is a guarantee of democracy, freedom, justice, and human rights. Nations cannot stay in the E.U. if they do not respect these guarantees.

However, if the religions in essence merely repeat statements from the United Nations Human Rights Declaration, such a Declaration becomes superfluous; an ethic is more than rights.