Julian Assange

“We don't have sources who are dissidents on other sources. Should they come forward, that would be a tricky situation for us. But we're presumably acting in such a way that people feel morally compelled to continue our mission, not to screw it up.”

“Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.”

“I'm not a big fan of regulation: anyone who likes freedom of the press can't be.”

“You can't do anything sensible until you know what the situation is that you're in.”

“We get information in the mail, the regular postal mail, encrypted or not, vet it like a regular news organization, format it - which is sometimes something that's quite hard to do, when you're talking about giant databases of information - release it to the public and then defend ourselves against the inevitable legal and political attacks.”

“That's a problem. I mean, like any sort of growing startup organization, we are sort of overwhelmed by our growth. And that means we're getting enormous quantity of whistleblower disclosures of a very high caliber, but don't have enough people to actually process and vet this information.”

“The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.”

“Cryptography is the essential building block of independence for organisations on the Internet, just like armies are the essential building blocks of states, because otherwise one state just takes over another.”

“True information does good.”

“Courage is not the absence of fear. Only fools have no fear. Rather, courage is the intellectual mastery of fear by understanding the true risks and opportunities of the situation and keeping those things in balance”

“It raises questions about the natural instincts of Clinton that, when confronted with a serious domestic political scandal, she tries to blame the Russians, blame the Chinese, et cetera.”

“I am an Australian citizen, and I miss my country a great deal.”

“Democratic societies need a strong media, and WikiLeaks is part of that media.”

“It's interesting that Swiss banks also hide their assets from the Swiss by using offshore bank structuring.”

“To be alive as a human being is to know, in the same way as it is to have a heart that beats.”

“We have a way of dealing with information that has sort of personal - personally identifying information in it. But there are legitimate secrets - you know, your records with your doctor; that's a legitimate secret. But we deal with whistleblowers that are coming forward that are really sort of well motivated.”

“Being editor of WikiLeaks was always a pretty difficult job.”

“Through the confessional system, the Catholic church spied upon the lives of its congregants. While Latin mass excluded most people who could not speak Latin from an understanding of the very system of thought that bound them.”

“Journalists always like an excuse for why are they talking about something now when they didn't talk about something a week ago. They always like to say something is new.”

“We like to engage in a normal publishing effort, which is to act in a responsible manner and make sure the material is not likely to harm anyone, that it is properly investigated by quality news organizations, and by lawyers and human rights groups and so on.”