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.

Free software’ is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer’.

One basis for society is that of helping your neighbor — but in the software world this is piracy. To prevent this, the U.S. is putting in place practices which are like those in the...

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.

H.R. 354 would effectively allow facts to become private property, simply through their inclusion in an electronic database. Ominously, many collections of public records, maintained by companies on contracts to governments, would become property of...

Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.

I partly agree with the underlying message that people should take charge and solve problems, rather than just cast blame on others.

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.

If you focus your mind on the freedom and community that you can build by staying firm, you will find the strength to do it.

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 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...

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

Accusations against innocent people happen with terrible regularity, and the danger of false convictions is immense.

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...

The free world welcomes Sun’s decision to use the Free Software Foundation’s GPL.

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.

Anything that prevents you from being friendly, a good neighbour, is a terror tactic.

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.

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.

The world has sprung very nasty threats on us and our software.

I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it.

designed to prohibit all free software. It covers only code that implements, precisely, the Microsoft formats, which means that a program under this license does not permit modification.

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.

British book publishers plan to put a microchip into every book to record who owns it – an unprecedented surveillance measure.

We’ve partly removed the inconveniences of preventing a user from combining code from various free software packages.

[UCITA] applies to any sort of computer-readable information. Even if you use only free software, you are likely to read articles on your computer, and access databases. UCITA will allow the publishers to impose the...

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,...

I found it tremendously humiliating to be there because most of the kids there were brain dead or psychotic.

Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. ‘Don’t bother us with politics’, respond those who don’t want to learn.

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

I founded the free software movement, a movement for freedom to cooperate. Open source was a reaction against our idealism. We are still here and the open-source people have not wiped us out.

part of the long-term effort to liberate cyberspace.