22 Quotes & Sayings By Julian Assange

Julian Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks. He is an Australian hacking activist, publisher, author, and performance artist. Born in Townsville, Queensland, Assange moved to Melbourne, Australia, with his mother in 1991. He attended Central Queensland University but dropped out after two terms to work for an internet service provider Read more

He launched WikiLeaks in 2006. In 2010 the organisation published more than 90,000 classified or otherwise secret documents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and the imprisonment of alleged members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, among others. In November 2010 WikiLeaks published a video that showed a US helicopter gunship attack on a Reuters journalist and Reuters staff in Baghdad that killed at least 12 people.

In December 2010 WikiLeaks released a set of over 90,000 documents from the US State Department taken from a private network used by diplomats in Iraq. This was followed by a second tranche of classified US diplomatic cables in late October 2011. After Assange's initial appeal was rejected by a Swedish court in 2010 he fled to Sweden where he had been living under asylum since August 2012.

The Metropolitan Police Service of London launched a European Arrest Warrant against him on behalf of US authorities for his role in publishing classified US material through WikiLeaks. In November 2010 Swedish prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Assange's failure to appear at a hearing regarding allegations that he had raped two women while he was out on bail in Sweden in 2010 after being accused of rape and sexual molestation by two women in Stockholm in 2010 on accusations made by one woman while he was out on bail on unrelated charges of rape and sexual molestation in Sweden. In February 2012 a Stockholm court ruled that Assange would be extradited to Sweden within weeks despite repeated denials from Sweden's government that it would extradite him on any charges.

An arrest warrant was issued for Assange when he failed to comply with the order to present himself before the court at 10:30am GMT (5:30am EST) on 5 February 2012 which was subsequently withdrawn after he presented himself at 10:38am GMT (5:38am EST). At 11:07am GMT (6:07am EDT) on 5 February 2012 British police officers entered his London embassy residence and arrested him without resistance and took him into custody at a central London police station where he was charged under section 7 of the British Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987 with breaking his bail conditions by failing to surrender himself to custody when required by

1
Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. Julian Assange
2
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 Julian Assange
3
Reality is an aspect of property. It must be seized. And investigative journalism is the noble art of seizing reality back from the powerful. Julian Assange
4
Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims. Julian Assange
5
The sense of perspective that interaction with multiple cultures gives you I find to be extremely valuable, because it allows you to see the structure of a country with greater clarity, and gives you a sense of mental independence. Julian Assange
6
The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization. These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there. While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy. Julian Assange
7
One of the best ways to achieve justice is to expose injustice. Julian Assange
8
The internet has become a political space. I think that is one of the most important developments in the past decade. Julian Assange
9
Power is a thing of perception. They don't need to be able to kill you. They just need you to think they are able to kill you Julian Assange
10
Google's colourful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under six billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a year - an opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history. Julian Assange
11
Opponents past and present have the same essential weakness about them: first they want to use you, then they want to be you, then they want to snuff you out. Julian Assange
12
You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion. Julian Assange
13
Journalism should be more like science. As far as possible, facts should be verifiable. If journalists want long-term credibility for their profession, they have to go in that direction. Have more respect for readers. Julian Assange
14
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. Julian Assange
15
Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior. Julian Assange
16
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. Julian Assange
17
The greater the power, the more need there is for transparency, because if the power is abused, the result can be so enormous. On the other hand, those people who do not have power, we mustn't reduce their power even more by making them yet more transparent. Julian Assange
18
Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves. Julian Assange
19
I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination. Julian Assange
20
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. Julian Assange
21
In my role as Wikileaks editor, I've been involved in fighting off many legal attacks. To do that, and keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions. Julian Assange