Moglen Quotes & Sayings

As the commercial confrontation between [free software] and software-that's-a-product becomes more fierce, patent law's going to be the terrain on which a big piece of the war's going to be fought. Waterloo is here somewhere. — Eben Moglen

[on the future of hand-drawn animation] I'm actually not that worried. I wouldn't give up on it completely. Once in a while there are strange, rich people who like to invest in odd things. You're going to have people in the corners of garages making cartoons to please themselves. And I'm more interested in those people than I am in big business. — Hayao Miyazaki

Those who want to share their code can make products and share their work without additional legal risks. — Eben Moglen

We're only passers-by, and all you can do is love what you have in your life. A person has to fight the meanness that sometimes comes with you when you're born, sometimes grows if you aren't in lucky surroundings. It's our challenge to fend it off, leave it behind us choking and gasping for breath in the mud. It's our task to seek out something with truth for us, no matter if there is a hundred-mile obstacle course in the way, or a ramshackle old farmhouse that binds and binds. — Jane Hamilton

If you're a capitalist and you have the best goods and they're free, you don't have to proselytize, you just have to wait. — Eben Moglen

Everybody is connected to everybody else, all data that can be shared will be shared: get used to it. — Eben Moglen

A desire for privacy does not imply shameful secrets; Moglen argues, again and again, that without anonymity in discourse, free speech is impossible, and hence also democracy. The right to speak the truth to power does not shield the speaker from the consequences of doing so; only comparable power or anonymity can do that. — Nick Harkaway

There is a First Amendment right to speak in a encrypted way ... The right to speak P.G.P. is like the right to speak Navajo. The Government has no particular right to prevent you from speaking in a technical manner even if it is inconvenient for them to understand. — Eben Moglen

Can a one judge sitting somewhere in a trial court issue an order that says nobody in the world is allowed to have, to use, to improve or to develop software for playing multimedia content without the permission of the manufacturers of the content themselves? .. This is an astonishing development in the course of our understanding of what we call the copyright bargain, the relationship between authors' rights, publishers' leverages and consumers' needs. — Eben Moglen

The great moral question of the 21st century is this: if all knowing, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone? — Eben Moglen

Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity. — Spiro Kostof

The trouble with cats is that they've got no tact. — P.G. Wodehouse

Who you love is an illustration of you ... but whomever loves you back is you ... in HD. — Ingrid Weir

You could make a good case that the history of social life is about the history of the technology of memory. That social order and control, structure of governance, social cohesion in states or organizations larger than face-to- face society depends on the nature of the technology of memory-both how it works and what it remembers In short, what societies value is what they memorize, and how they memorize it, and who has access to its memorized form determines the structure of power that the society represents and acts from. — Eben Moglen

The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record: he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age. — Eben Moglen