Julian Assange Quotes

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.

Every time we witness an act that we feel to be unjust and do not act, we become a party to injustice.

Wikileaks is a mechanism to maximize the flow of information to maximize the amount of action leading to just reform.

Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa - previously people fleeing those problems didn't end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by Gaddafi: 'What do these Europeans think they're doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There's going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe', and this is exactly what happened.

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.

As we have seen, WikiLeaks is a robust organization. During my time in solitary confinement in the basement of a Victorian prison, we continue to release, our media partners continued to write stories. The important revelations from this material continue to come out. We have approximately 2,000 cables into 250,000.

WikiLeaks has been a very strong proponent of the Freedom of Information Act. This is probably, actually, if you think about it, probably against our interests as - as a publisher. But we believe that people have the right to know true information about what their government is doing.

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

WikiLeaks is a source protection organization. We are famous for never having exposed one of our sources over 10 years. That's why sources trust us and they come to us.

Stopping leaks is a new form of censorship.

One of the best ways to achieve justice is to expose injustice.

Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.

Of course, no state accepts [that it should call] the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons, political prisoners. They don't call them political prisoners in China, they don't call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan and they don't call them political prisoners in the United States, U.K. or Sweden; it is absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception.

Every time you go to a party and take a picture and post that picture to Facebook, you're being a rat. You're being a narc.

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.

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.

If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America's political police.

My motivation for 20 years, for 10 years with WikiLeaks, has been to publish true information that is otherwise unsayable. So we're not in competition, if you like.

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.

As always, most media aligns with the presumptive winner even though their claimed societal virtue is to investigate those in power.

[Hillary Clinton] had put her favoured agent, Sidney Blumenthal, on to that; there's more than 1700 emails out of the thirty three thousand Hillary Clinton emails that we've published, just about Libya.

What we know is everything, it is our limit, of what we can be.

The question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network? She's a centralising cog. You've got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis.

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.

People love WikiLeaks when it is exposing corruption in their opponents. People oppose WikiLeaks when it is exposing corruption or dangerous behavior in themselves.

The U.N. [the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention] has looked into this whole situation. They spent eighteen months in formal, adversarial litigation. [So it's] me and the U.N. verses Sweden and the U.K. Who's right? The U.N. made a conclusion that I am being arbitrarily detained illegally, deprived of my freedom and that what has occurred has not occurred within the laws that the United Kingdom and Sweden, and that [those countries] must obey. It is an illegal abuse.

Well, I mean, the real attack on truth is tabloid journalism in the United States.

Libya, more than anyone else's war, was Hillary Clinton's war. Barak Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it? Hillary Clinton.

My personal analysis is that, if you are concerned about U.S. foreign policy and getting into foolish wars, then Hillary Clinton is not your woman. On the other hand, I mean neither is Donald Trump.

If a source gives us material that is of political, diplomatic, ethical or historical significance that has not been published before and is comprised of official documents or recordings, then we will publish it.

Because [Donald Trump] so clearly - through his words and actions and the type of people that turn up at his rallies - represents people who are not the middle, not the upper middle educated class, there is a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with them, a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting Trump in any way, including any criticism of Hillary Clinton.

The only way to keep a secret is to never have one.

When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realisation dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like.

Where they couldn't pick holes in our arguments they would drive horses and carriages through my character.

If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes.

Non-conformity is the only real passion worth being ruled by.

Here we have a case, the Swedish case, where I have never been charged with a crime, where I have already been cleared [by the Stockholm prosecutor] and found to be innocent, where the woman herself said that the police made it up, where the United Nations formally said the whole thing is illegal, where the State of Ecuador also investigated and found that I should be given asylum. Those are the facts, but what is the rhetoric?

The Clinton camp has been able to project that kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria: that Russia is responsible for everything.

Libya, more than anyone else's war, was Hillary Clinton's war. Barak Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it? Hillary Clinton. That's documented throughout her emails.

You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you.

I don't like the word transparency; cold dead glass is transparent. I prefer education or understanding, which are more human.

Cryptography is the ultimate form of non-violent direct action.

Sweden formally writing back to the United Nations to say, 'No, we're not going to [recognise the UN ruling], so leaving open their ability to extradite.

I found in investigative journalism it is always best, if you have any language skills, not to admit them.

Those who are repeatedly passive in the face of injustice soon find their character corroded.

The West has political prisoners.

A great number of those working for liberal causes are not only shy but borderline collusive. They want change to happen nicely, and it won't. They want decency to come about without anybody suffering or being embarrassed, and it won't. And most of all they want to give many of the enemies of open government the benefit of the doubt, and I don't. It's not just a difference of approach, it's a complete schism in our respective philosophy. You can't go about disclosure in the hope that it won't spoil anybody's dinner.

Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them.