Julian Assange Quotes

WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical.

There's more than 1700 emails out of the thirty three thousand Hillary Clinton emails that we've published, just about Libya. It's not that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of [Muammar] Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state - something that she would use in her run-up to the general election for President.

That is vaguely conspiratorial, in a networking sense. We have published their meeting notes.

Our [Russia]documents have gone on to be used in quite a number of court cases: refugee cases of people fleeing some kind of claimed political persecution in Russia, which they use our documents to back up.

I fell into a hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-back ed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces - forever.

Liberal papers are not necessarily liberal.

The best type of government comes from a government that is scrutinized by the people when they have true information about our governments, major corporations, other power actors in society.

What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? I give private information on corporations to you for free, and I'm a villain. Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s Man of the Year.

Hillary Clinton is the smooth central representation of all that, and 'all that' is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It's what we call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from Citi Bank. This is quite amazing.

In my situation, frankly, I'm a bit institutionalised - this [the embassy] is the world .. it's visually the world [for me].

Cablegate is 3,000 volumes of material. It is the greatest intellectual treasure to have entered into the public record in modern times.

If you see the rhetoric from coming out of the Democrats is that they're pro-civil liberties, and an important part of civil liberties is respect for the First Amendment and the rule of law, and that has broken down under the Obama administration, and Hillary Clinton was part of that process.

The difficulty that WikiLeaks has, of course, is that we can't go around speculating on who our sources are. That would be irresponsible.

The penetration of society by the Internet and the penetration of the Internet by society is the best thing that has ever happened to global human civilisation.

[The rhetoric] is trying to avoid [the truth that ] the U.N. formally found that the whole thing is illegal, never even mentioning that Ecuador made a formal assessment through its formal processes and found that yes, I am subject to persecution by the United States.

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.

I had had a lot of experience in bringing the Internet to Australia, and I saw that knowledge in the hands of people achieves reform.

There are the Podesta emails we've been publishing. [John] Podesta is Hillary Clinton's primary campaign manager, so there's a thread that runs through all these emails; there are quite a lot of pay-for-play, as they call it, giving access in exchange for money to states, individuals and corporations.

The Obama administration has attempted to prosecute more journalists and journalistic sources under the same Espionage Act she was being investigated under in all previous presidencies combined.

The attack on the truth by war begins long before war starts and continues long after a war ends.

One of the hopeful things that I've discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could've stopped it if they had searched deep enough; if they hadn't reprinted government propaganda they could've stopped it.

So when Putin goes out to buy a Coke, thirty seconds later it is known in Washington DC.

In fact, during her [Hillary Clinton] tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from the United States in terms of the dollar value, doubled.

There's, under Obama, an epidemic has developed of abusing national security laws to crack down on legitimate use of the First Amendment.

I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable.

The rhetoric is pretending, constantly pretending that I have been charged with a crime, and never mentioning that I have been already previously cleared, never mentioning that the woman herself says that the police made it up.

We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents cover 109,000 deaths. That is serious matter.

I'm not a big fan of regulation: anyone who likes freedom of the press can't be.

I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.

Which country is suffering from too much freedom of speech? Name it, is there one?

I made an asylum application to Ecuador in this embassy, because of the U.S. extradition case, and the result was that after a month, I was successful in my asylum application. The embassy since then has been surrounded by police: quite an expensive police operation which the British government admits to spending more than £12.6 million.

I mean, there's enormous pressures to harmonize freedom of speech legislation and transparency legislation around the world - within the E.U., between China and the United States. Which way is it going to go? It's hard to see.

Why is it that govt employees makes the best spouses? Because afterthey come back from work, they are not tired and they already readthe newspapers.

We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical.

And if Bradley Manning really did as he is accused, he is a hero, an example to us all and one of the world's foremost political prisoners.

The most important publication of WikiLeaks is that it has published more than 10 million documents. The most important single collection of material we have published is the US diplomatic cable series. We started with 251,000 in 2011, but are up to 3 million now and have more coming.

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.

A lot of people who work for WikiLeaks have the same instinct as me: If you are pushed you push back.

Let's say that, personally, I loved Hillary Clinton. Would WikiLeaks still publish this material? Of course it would. Otherwise, we would be censoring it. That's our mandate. It's actually interesting to think about what media organizations wouldn't publish such material if it was given to them.

Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented.

These megaleaks... They're an important phenomenon, and they're only going to increase.

The corruption in reporting starts very early. It's like the police reporting on the police.

Let us not compare Edward Snowden's situation with that of Chelsea Manning or Jeremy Hammond, who is also imprisoned in the United States. As a result of WikiLeaks' hard work, Edward Snowden has political asylum, has travel documents, lives with his girlfriend, goes to the ballet and earns substantial speaking fees. Edward Snowden is essentially free and happy. That is no coincidence. It was my strategy to undo the chilling effect of the 35 year Manning sentence and it has worked.

This generation is burning the mass media to the ground.

We have a way of dealing with information that has sort of personal - personally identifying information in it. But there are legitimate secrets - you know, your records with your doctor; that's a legitimate secret. But we deal with whistleblowers that are coming forward that are really sort of well motivated.

There is nothing new in this world other than the history that you don't know yet.

Transparency in government leads to reduced corruption.