"Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture them." — Julian Assange (Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, 2012)

"Proprietary software is an injustice. It denies users freedom and keeps them divided and helpless." — Richard Stallman (Free Software, Free Society, 2002) #proprietarysoftware #freedom

"Google and Facebook are not really in the business of data – they are in the business of power." — Carissa Véliz (Privacy is power (Aeon), 2019) #surveillance #power #techcompanies #data

"If the federal government can't even count how many laws there are, what chance does an individual have of being certain that they are not acting in violation of one of them?" — Moxie Marlinspike (We Should All Have Something To Hide, 2013) #law #privacy #surveillance #government

"Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — have been given an enormous privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out." — Aaron Swartz (Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, 2008) #openaccess

"How can we translate the freedom afforded by the Internet to ordinary life?" — Jim Bell (Assassination Politics, 1997) #freedom #internet #cypherpunk

"They're abridging the freedom and privacy of all citizens—to defend us against a bogeyman that they will not explain. The decision to literally trade away our privacy is one that must be made by the whole society, not made unilaterally by a military spy agency." — John Gilmore (Crypto Rebels (WIRED), 1993) #privacy #freedom #government #nsa #democracy

"Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live." — John Perry Barlow (A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996) #cyberspace #philosophy #digitalworld

"Be interested in liberty and the freedom to transact and speak to get back to the original motivations. Don't spend time trying to make government-friendly financial alternatives." — Tim May (CoinDesk, 2018) #liberty #freedom #transactions #government

"By its very nature, it favors the bright (who can put it to use) over the dull (who cannot). It favors the adaptable (who are quick to see the merit of the new) over the sluggish (who cling to time-tested ways). And what two better words are there to describe government bureaucracy than 'dull' and 'sluggish'?" — Chuck Hammill (From Crossbows To Cryptography: Techno-Thwarting The State, 1987) #government #freedom

"Bitcoin is a tool of resistance gifted to us by Satoshi. The idea has escaped and the idea of cryptocurrency will not be stopped." — Amir Taaki (The libbitcoin Manifesto, 2013) #bitcoin #resistance #cryptocurrency #freedom

"You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts." — John Perry Barlow (A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996) #government #regulation #cyberspace

"The people in this room hope for a world where an individual's informational footprints—everything from an opinion on abortion to the medical record of an actual abortion—can be traced only if the individual involved chooses to reveal them; a world where coherent messages shoot around the globe by network and microwave, but intruders and feds trying to pluck them out of the vapor find only gibberish." — Steven Levy (Crypto Rebels (WIRED), 1993) #privacy #cypherpunk #encryption #freedom

"We hope this will inspire others to work in this fascinating area in which participation has been discouraged in the recent past by a nearly total government monopoly." — Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman (New Directions in Cryptography, 1976) #cryptography #government #monopoly #freedom

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." — Edward Snowden (Reddit AMA, 2015) #privacy #freespeech

"Fundamentally, I believe we will have the kind of society that most people want. If we want freedom and privacy, we must persuade others that these are worth having. There are no shortcuts." — Hal Finney (Politics vs Technology, 1994) #freedom #privacy

"Technological ideas and technological things are not politically neutral: routinely, they have strong, built-in tendencies." — Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015) #politics

"Cryptography is the ultimate form of non-violent direct action." — Julian Assange (Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, 2012) #cryptography #nonviolence

"It is important to realize that while distributed consensus is a hard problem, ordinary consensus is much easier and better studied, and can be solved some trillions of times more efficiently by use of trusted identifiable signing parties. Therefore, cryptocurrencies which compromise by introducing trusted parties, even under limited circumstances, should consider whether their new trust model is one for which consensus is easily achieved by some other mechanism." — Andrew Poelstra (On Stake and Consensus, 2015) #consensus #trust #cryptocurrency #bitcoin

"Efforts to influence the government (e.g., lobbying and propaganda) are important only in so far as to delay its attempted crackdown long enough for the technology to mature and come into wide use." — Wei Dai (Cypherpunks mailing list, 1995) #lobbying