Jimmy Wales Quotes

Freedom, liberty, individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a matter that is not initiating force against them, is critical to me.

Simply having rules does not change the things that people want to do. You have to change incentive.

I think that reality exists and that it's knowable.

I am really accessible.

There's a big tendency to gravitate toward a closed and proprietary approach too easily.

I worry about censorship in many parts of the world.

People take issue with individual aspects of Wikipedia all the time. But it's kind of hard to hate the general idea of a free encyclopedia. It's like hating kittens.

If I had some information, the last thing I would ever do with it is send it to Wikileaks.

Wikipedia is the #5 site on the Web and serves 450 million different people every month - with billions of page views.

Our growth rate continues to be staggering.

Mostly, I try to take a rational approach to life.

There's plenty of rude stuff online. People say things online that they would be ashamed to say face to face. If people could treat others as though they were speaking face to face, that would be huge.

Most people assume the fights are going to be the left versus the right, but it always is the reasonable versus the jerks.

People who have achieved a public voice find it a mixed bag.

In general, the best advice I can give people is to take criticism seriously, apologize for anything you have done wrong, and pull back from conflict. Of course, if you are right on a content matter, you should press forward in the interest of quality, but conflict often has a way of taking on a life of its own, unfortunately.

While I'm optimistic about the direction the world is headed, generally, I think there is a need for constant vigilance and pressure on repressive governments.

Love. It isn't very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it's a very very important part of what holds our project together.

I still believe there is a need to open up search and it will come eventually. It is very important to challenge the current models.

Most people are good. They may not be saints, but they are good.

We've seen how grassroots journalism by blogs has had an impact at various points politically, as ordinary people have amplified stories that were being ignored by the traditional press.

Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it's a bunch of random people interacting.

To create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language - That's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal.

Free speech includes the right to not speak.

Massive numbers of people are going to come online from cultures we don't normally interact with.

If it isn't on Google, it doesn't exist.

I just get up every day and do what seems like the most interesting, fun thing to do.

The Supreme Court has held that code is speech. And it doesn't matter that it's done on a computer or done face to face or done in a newspaper, reporting the facts of the world is protected speech.

The goal is to give people a free encyclopedia to every person in the world, in their own language. Not just in a 'free beer' kind of way, but also in the free speech kind of way.

If you see a blatant error or misconception about yourself, you really want to set it straight.