Julian Assange

“These big-package releases. There should be a cute name for them.”

“Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.”

“During the period of house arrest, I had an electronic manacle around my leg for 24 hours a day, and for someone who has tried to give others liberty all their adult life, that is absolutely intolerable.”

“In my role as Wikileaks editor, I've been involved in fighting off many legal attacks. To do that, and keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions.”

“By bringing out into the public domain how human institutions actually behave, we can understand frankly, to a degree, for the first time the civilization that we actually have.”

“What is the possible benefit? Can this material save lives? Can it improve the quality of life in Iraq? Can it tend to shape our perceptions of how war should and should not be conducted? Can it shape our perceptions of who should be conducting war and in what manner? And the answer to that is a clear yes.”

“The sense of perspective that interaction with multiple cultures gives you I find to be extremely valuable, because it allows you to see the structure of a country with greater clarity, and gives you a sense of mental independence.”

“So far, we have a perfect record of WikiLeaks having never revealed information that exposed a source over 10 years.”

“You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you.”

“My family has had to move and change their name and have been subject to threats from right wing blogs calling for my son, for example, to be killed to get at me.”

“As we have seen, WikiLeaks is a robust organization. During my time in solitary confinement in the basement of a Victorian prison, we continue to release, our media partners continued to write stories. The important revelations from this material continue to come out. We have approximately 2,000 cables into 250,000.”

“The media helps keep government honest.”

“Stopping leaks is a new form of censorship.”

“To keep a person ignorant is to place them in a cage.”

“In the history of Wikileaks, nobody has claimed that the material being put out is not authentic.”

“We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents cover 109,000 deaths. That is serious matter.”

“We have to be careful about applying criminal labels to people until we're very sure.”

“Wikileaks is a mechanism to maximize the flow of information to maximize the amount of action leading to just reform.”

“I believe that the way to justice is education.”

“Well, there's a question as to what sort of information is important in the world, what sort of information can achieve reform. And there's a lot of information. So information that organizations are spending economic effort into concealing, that's a really good signal that when the information gets out, there's a hope of it doing some good.”