John Perry Barlow Quotations

Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.

I had always thought that the idea of love at first sight was one of those things invented by lady novelists from the South with three names.

But groundless hope, like unconditional love, is the only kind worth having.

It didn't matter what we did or where we did it as long as we were together. We knew we'd found what most people either pursue in years of futile search or dismiss as a fantasy at the outset: the missing half of ourselves. The real thing.

The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.

Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass.

In Cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance.

I personally think intellectual property is an oxymoron. Physical objects have a completely different natural economy than intellectual goods. It's a tricky thing to try to own something that remains in your possession even after you give it to many others.

So I'm just waiting until one party or the other actually gets a moral compass and a backbone.

The Internet may well disempower the nation state, but at the same time, it also strengthens certain specific state functions - like surveillance. As a political entity, it doesn't empower the nation sate. It creates the availability of much more data than the digestive system of the nation state could possibly assimilate.

Any powerful technology has sauce for the goose and the gander... It's just an extension of humanity.

The 'Total Information Awareness' project is truly diabolical - mostly because of the legal changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to all sorts of private and commercial databases that were previously off limits.

The Internet amplifies power in all respects. It can grossly exaggerate the power of the individual.

But generally speaking, I felt to engage in the political process was to sully oneself to such a degree that whatever came out wasn't worth the trouble put in.

Google, Amazon, Apple. Any number of cloud providers and computer service providers who can increasingly limit your access to your own information, control all your processing, take away your data if they want to, and observe everything you do; in a way, that does give them some leverage over your own life.

You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

I'm still strongly opposed to antismoking laws, strongly opposed to any law that regulates personal behavior.

Everyone seems to be playing well within the boundaries of his usual rule set. I have yet to hear anyone say something that seemed likely to mitigate the idiocy of this age.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge.

I mean I look forward to the day when I can be Republican again.

I think that humor is part of what saves us from despair.

It's widely assumed that you can't compete with free, and that seems like a reasonable thing to think. But this has not been my experience.

Most scientific revelations happened after the pursuit of knowledge quit being secret and hermetic.

Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.

I think the 'counterculture' believes that there are ways to manage being the world's most powerful country that involve creation of consensus - ruling by virtuous example rather than by force of arms.

There are a lot of kids out there copying and distributing movies - not because they care about seeing the movies or sharing them with their friends, but because they want to stick it to the movie business.

The government targets 'Anonymous' for the same reason it targets al-Qaida - because they're the enemy.

They seem to have forgotten that, and are back saying the only purpose of P2P networks is for illegal trading of owned goods. We claim part of the reason for P2P is for legal trading of what ought to be in public domain. And what is in public domain in many cases.

If you have the 'Total Information Awareness' project working, it might be relatively easy to find everyone who had bought more than a ton of fertilizer and 500 gallons of diesel in the last year, which would be a great way of spotting potential Tim McVeighs - but it would also spot half the farmers and ranchers in America.

I don't think that the movie industry is any more ready than any other part of the information industries to adapt itself to the information age. But it's going to go there one way or the other.

I have always felt that no matter how inscrutable its ways and means, the universe is working perfectly and working according to a greater plan than we can know.

The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.

If you're not lost, you're not much of an explorer.

The one thing that I know government is good for is countervailing against monopoly. It's not great at that either, but it's the only force I know that is fairly reliable

New solutions win by virtue of adoption, and they don't get adopted if they're bad solutions.

Notions of property, value, ownership, and the nature of wealth itself are changing more fundamentally than at any time since the Sumerians first poked cuneiform into wet clay and called it stored grain ... few people are aware of the enormity of this shift and fewer of them are lawyers or public officials.

I don't know that I believe in the supernatural, but I do believe in miracles, and our time together was filled with the events of magical unlikelihood.

The real issue is control. The Internet is too widespread to be easily dominated by any single government. By creating a seamless global economic zone, anti-sovereign and unregulatable, the Internet calls into question the very idea of a nation-state.

I've begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves.

I'm a member of that half of the human race which is inclined to divide the human race into two kinds of people. My dividing line runs between the people who crave certainty and the people who trust chance.

Art is a service, not a product. Created beauty is a relationship, and a relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work to 'content' is like praying in swear words. End of Sermon. Back to business.

Incompetence is a double-edged banana.

Humanity seems bent on creating a world economy primarily based on goods that take no material form. In doing so, we may be eliminating any predictable connection between creators and a fair reward for the utility others may find in their works.

God's jokes are the soul's curriculum.

The more you've got, the shorter it feels.

Hope does not always require probability.

Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions. Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate that expands with development. Imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where business you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs...

I support freedom of expression, no matter whose, so I oppose DDoS attacks regardless of their target... they're the poison gas of cyberspace.

Our universities are so determined to impose tolerance that they'll expel you for saying what you think and never notice the irony

The Corporate impulse for human uniformity instills shame at difference and, thus, the contemporary zeal for privacy.

One can imagine the government's problem. This is all pretty magical stuff to them. If I were trying to terminate the operations of a witch coven, I'd probably seize everything in sight. How would I tell the ordinary household brooms from the getaway vehicles?

Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.

The future's here, we are it, we are on our own

With the development of the Internet...we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back farther.

We are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire.

When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.

I have a feeling Virtual Reality will further expose the conceit that 'reality' is a fact. It will provide another reminder of the seamless continuity between the world outside and the world within, delivering another major hit to the old fraud of objectivity. 'Real,' as Kevin Kelly put it, 'is going to be one of the most relative words we'll have.'

We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

I ... believe that angels, or something like them, sometimes live among us, hidden within our fellow human beings.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Out of the ashes of the music business, comes the rebirth of the musician business.

If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.

The entertainment industry is as it always has been. It's a rough bunch of people and a rough industry.

The Internet is the most liberating tool for humanity ever invented, and also the best for surveillance. It's not one or the other. It's both.