John Perry Barlow

“The Internet is the most liberating tool for humanity ever invented, and also the best for surveillance. It's not one or the other. It's both.”

“It's widely assumed that you can't compete with free, and that seems like a reasonable thing to think. But this has not been my experience.”

“So I'm just waiting until one party or the other actually gets a moral compass and a backbone.”

“I personally think intellectual property is an oxymoron. Physical objects have a completely different natural economy than intellectual goods. It's a tricky thing to try to own something that remains in your possession even after you give it to many others.”

“It didn't matter what we did or where we did it as long as we were together. We knew we'd found what most people either pursue in years of futile search or dismiss as a fantasy at the outset: the missing half of ourselves. The real thing.”

“I think that humor is part of what saves us from despair.”

“Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.”

“You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.”

“Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.”

“The 'Total Information Awareness' project is truly diabolical - mostly because of the legal changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to all sorts of private and commercial databases that were previously off limits.”

“The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.”

“If you have the 'Total Information Awareness' project working, it might be relatively easy to find everyone who had bought more than a ton of fertilizer and 500 gallons of diesel in the last year, which would be a great way of spotting potential Tim McVeighs - but it would also spot half the farmers and ranchers in America.”

“Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.”

“We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.”

“Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.”

“Most scientific revelations happened after the pursuit of knowledge quit being secret and hermetic.”

“I mean I look forward to the day when I can be Republican again.”

“The government targets 'Anonymous' for the same reason it targets al-Qaida - because they're the enemy.”

“Google, Amazon, Apple. Any number of cloud providers and computer service providers who can increasingly limit your access to your own information, control all your processing, take away your data if they want to, and observe everything you do; in a way, that does give them some leverage over your own life.”

“But generally speaking, I felt to engage in the political process was to sully oneself to such a degree that whatever came out wasn't worth the trouble put in.”