Aaron Swartz Quotes

As the Internet breaks down the last justifications for a professional class of politicians, it also builds up the tools for replacing them.

No, you can't force other people to change. You can, however, change just about everything else. And usually, that's enough.

What is the most important thing you could be working on in the world right now? ... And if you're not working on that, why aren't you?

Social Security got passed because John D. Rockefeller was sick of having to take money out of his profits to pay for his workers' pension funds. Why do that, when you can just let the government take money from the workers?

Nearly 75,000 Demand Progress members have urged Congress to fix the Patriot Act.

But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

Senator Wyden continues to be the Senate's truest champion of an open Internet.

Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.

When I go to a library and I see the librarian at her desk reading, I'm afraid to interrupt her, even though she sits there specifically so that she may be interrupted, even though being interrupted for reasons like this by people like me is her very job.

Real education is about genuine understanding and the ability to figure things out on your own; not about making sure every 7th grader has memorized all the facts some bureaucrats have put in the 7th grade curriculum.

You only get to see your own perspective. And even our mistakes make sense from our perspective - we see all of the context, everything that led up to it. It all makes sense because we saw it happen. When we screw up, it's for a reason. When other people screw up, it's because they're screwups.

Life is short ... so why waste it doing something dumb?

Before I went to college I read two books. I read a book "Moral Mazes" by Robert Jackall which is a study of how corporations work, and it's actually a fascinating book, this sociologist, he just picks a corporation at random and just goes and studies the middle managers, not the people who do any of the grunt work and not the big decision makers, just the people whose job is to make sure that things day to day get done, and he shows how even though they're all perfectly reasonable people, perfectly nice people you'd be happy to meet any of them, all the things that they were accomplishing were just incredibly evil. So you have these people in this average corporation, they were making decisions to blow out their worker's eardrums in the factory, to poison the lakes and the lagoons nearby, to make these products that are filled with toxic chemicals that poisoned their customers, not because any of them were bad people and wanted to kill their workers and their neighbourhood and their customers, but just because that was the logic of the situation they were in.

Another book I read was a book "Understanding Power" by Noam Chomsky which kind of took the same sort of analysis but applied it to wider society which you know we're in a situation where it may be filled with perfectly good people but they're in these structures that cause them to continually do evil, to invade countries, to bomb people, to take money from poor people and give it to rich people, to do all th

Being around some of the bright lights of the technology world and having them expect great things helps you sit down and do it seriously.

Now, as far as I know, nobody has ever put up the U.S.'s nuclear missiles on the Internet. I mean, it's not something I've heard about.

Books are totally useless unless you take their advice. If you just keep reading them, thinking "that's so insightful! that changes everything," but never actually doing anything different, then pretty quickly the feeling will wear off and you'll start searching for another book to fill the void.

Normally, I just sit in my quiet little room and do the small things that bring me pleasures. I read my books, I answer email, I write a little bit.

The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.

Steadfastness is a noble quality, but unguided by knowledge or humility, it becomes rashness, or obstinacy.

People shouldn't be forced to categorize themselves as "gay," "straight," or "bi." People are just people. Maybe you're mostly attracted to men. Maybe you're mostly attracted to women. Maybe you're attracted to everyone. These are historical claims - not future predictions. If we truly want to expand the scope of human freedom, we should encourage people to date who they want; not just provide more categorical boxes for them to slot themselves into. A man who has mostly dated men should be just as welcome to date women as a woman who's mostly dated men.
So that's why I'm not gay. I hook up with people. I enjoy it. Sometimes they're men, sometimes they're women. I don't see why it needs to be any more complicated than that.

Most people, it seems, stretch the truth to make themselves seem more impressive. I, it seems, stretch the truth to make myself look worse.

We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file-sharing networks.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral - it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

I think deeply about things and want others to do likewise. I work for ideas and learn from people. I don't like excluding people. I'm a perfectionist, but I won't let that get in the way of publication. Except for education and entertainment, I'm not going to waste my time on things that won't have an impact. I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don't take me seriously. I don't hold grudges, it's not productive, but I learn from my experience. I want to make the world a better place.

At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by cheating the poor, and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause.

I have developed my most meaningful relationships online. None of them live within driving distance. None of them are about my own age.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it - their shareholders would revolt at anything less.

Think deeply about things. Don't just go along because that's the way things are or that's what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think.

Say yes to everything.

Through the Internet, I've developed a strong social network - something I could never do if I had to keep my choice of peers within school grounds.

I was around computers from birth; we had one of the first Macs, which came out shortly before I was born, and my dad ran a company that wrote computer operating systems. I don't think I have any particular technical skills; I just got a really large head start.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge - we'll make it a thing of the past.

The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it.

What is "this drive"? It's the tendency to not simply accept things as they are but to want to think about them, to understand them. To not be content to simply feel sad but to ask what sadness means. To not just get a bus pass but to think about the economic reasons getting a bus pass makes sense. I call this tendency the intellectual.

Assume nobody else has any idea what they're doing, either.

Now everyone has a license to speak, it's a question of who gets heard.

I'm not such a nuisance to the world, and the kick I get out of living can, I suppose, justify the impositions I make on it. But when life isn't so fun, well, then I start to wonder. What's the point of going on if it's just trouble for us both? My friends will miss me, I am told.