Every decision a person makes stems from the person's values and goals. People can have many different goals and values; fame, profit, love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person might have. When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that idealism. My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better.

I have not seen anyone assume that all the citizens of New York are guilty of murder, violence, robbery, perjury, or writing proprietary software.

People get the government their behavior deserves. People deserve better than that.

People said I should accept the world. Bullshit! I don't accept the world.

I have met bright students in computer science who have never seen the source code of a large program. They may be good at writing small programs, but they can't begin to learn the different skills of writing large ones if they can't see how others have done it.

The desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.

Because I don't believe that it's really desirable to have security on a computer, I shouldn't be willing to help uphold the security regime.