Stallman, Richard (Richard Stallman)

Collaboration itself doesn't excuse mistreating people.
-- Richard Stallman

Anything that prevents you from being friendly, a good neighbor, is a terror tactic.
-- Richard Stallman

Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking.
-- Richard Stallman

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

People get the government their behavior deserves. People deserve better than that.
-- Richard Stallman

Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone
-- Richard Stallman

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, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.
-- Richard Stallman

Every decision a person makes stems from the person's values and goals. People can have many different goals and values; fame, profit, love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person might have. When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that idealism.
-- Richard Stallman

My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better.
-- Richard Stallman

I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.
-- Richard Stallman

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. In other words, you need to be "pragmatic."
-- Richard Stallman

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. "Stand for something, or you will fall for nothing."
-- Richard Stallman

Instead of worrying about what somebody else is going to do, which is not under your control, the important thing is, what are you going to decide about what is under your control?
-- Richard Stallman

Protecting essential freedoms is always a matter of restricting the actions that would deny them.
-- Richard Stallman

Globalizing a bad thing makes it worse. But globalizing a good thing is usually good.
-- Richard Stallman