Julian assange quotes

Trump doesn't have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment, but banks, intelligence agencies, arms companies, big foreign money, are all united behind Hillary Clinton, and the media as well, media owners and even journalists themselves.

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.

Every War in the past 50 Years is a Result of Media Lies

The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the former head of the CIA [General David Petraeus] over classified information given to his mistress. Almost no-one is untouchable. The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no-one can resist us. But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI's investigation, so there's anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak. We've published about 33,000 of Clinton's emails when she was Secretary of State.

The one real irritant is that my young children - they also adapt. They adapt to being without their father. That's a hard, hard adaption which they didn't ask for. I worry about them; I worry about their mother.

Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented. Here we have the world's most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo.. all these major US organizations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence. It's not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for US intelligence to use.

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

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.

Secrecy breeds incompetence because where there is failure, failure is kept secret.

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

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.

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.

You can't publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism.

During the period of house arrest, I had an electronic manacle around my leg for 24 hours a day, and for someone who has tried to give others liberty all their adult life, that is absolutely intolerable.

I fell into a hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism.

The West has political prisoners.

Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior.

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

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

Large newspapers are routinely censored by legal costs. It is time this stopped. It is time a country said, enough is enough, justice must be seen, history must be preserved, and we will give shelter from the storm.

Dont shoot the messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths.

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.

The US presidency will continue to represent the major power groups of the United States - big business and the military - regardless of who the talking head is.

The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere.

What does censorship reveal? It reveals fear.

WikiLeaks has been publishing for ten years, and in those ten years, we have published ten million documents, several thousand individual publications, several thousand different sources, and we have never got it wrong.

If wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth.

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.

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 sense of perspective that interaction with multiple cultures gives you I find to be extremely valuable, because it allows you to see the structure of a country with greater clarity, and gives you a sense of mental independence.

I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud.

The goal is justice, the method? is transparency. It's important not to confuse the goal and the method.

Every law, every constitution, every regulative decision is based upon what people are discussing in their community. It's based upon our sum knowledge of history and the present.

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

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.

In late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it's the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya; jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis.

If journalism is good, it is controversial, by its nature.

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

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.

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.

In the justice system, we say there must be open justice where there is to be justice. The judged while trying must themselves be tried before the public.

Email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar that have been funding ISIS.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.

The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this and how she is benefitting politically, are quite extraordinary.

If we are to produce a more civilized society, a more just society, it has to be based on the truth.

If instituted, the TPP's IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you're ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs.

Transparency in government leads to reduced corruption.

Power factions fight back with lies.

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

I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick; they faint as a result of [the reaction] to their ambitions.

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.

Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love.

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

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

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

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

Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors.

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.

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.

The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free.

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.

It is getting to the point where the mark of international distinction and service to humanity is no longer the Nobel Peace Price, but an espionage indictment from the US Department of Justice.

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

That is my temperament. I enjoy creating systems on a grand scale, and I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards.

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.

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

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.

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?

WikiLeaks is really a litmus test for those people who walk the talk in the media. How much will they really follow their protestations to be brave publishers, and how much do they really want to lick the boots of power? Well, you can tell by their engagement with us and what they do.

The aim of Wikileaks is to achieve just reform around the world and do it through the mechanism of transparency.

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.

Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism.

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.

Now, is it the case that Facebook is actually run by U.S. intelligence? No, it's not like that. It's simply that U.S. intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure on them. And it's costly for them to hand out records one by one, so they have automated the process. 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.

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.

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

[Let's talk about] Donald Trump. What does he represent in the American mind and in the European mind? He represents American white trash, [which Hillary Clinton called] 'deplorable and irredeemable'. It means from an establishment or educated cosmopolitan, urbane perspective, these people are like the red necks, and you can never deal with them.

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.

As editor of WikiLeaks, I am very proud of three things. Number one, we have never got it wrong in terms of what we say. A document is what it is. Number two, we have never revealed one of our sources ever. Number three, what are we proud of? We are proud that there is not a single instance of anyone coming into physical harm as a result of our publication.

Stopping leaks is a new form of censorship.

One of the best attributes of human beings is that they're adaptable; one of the worst attributes of human beings is they are adaptable. They adapt and start to tolerate abuses, they adapt to being involved themselves in abuses, they adapt to adversity and they continue on.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

WikiLeaks does not publish from the jurisdiction of Ecuador, from this embassy or in the territory of Ecuador; we publish from France, we publish from, from Germany, we publish from The Netherlands and from a number of other countries, so that the attempted squeeze on WikiLeaks is through my refugee status; and this is, this is really intolerable. [It means] that [they] are trying to get at a publishing organisation; [they] try and prevent it from publishing true information that is of intense interest to the American people and others about an election.

Censorship is always cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care what people think.

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

It is impossible to correct abuses unless we know that theyre going on.

It really is my opinion that media in general are so bad that we have to question whether the world wouldn't be better off without them altogether. They are so distortive to how the world actually is that the result is.. we see wars, and we see corrupt governments continue on.

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.

If we can only live once, let it be a daring adventure.

You can't do anything sensible until you know what the situation is that you're in.

Hilary Clinton stated multiple times, falsely, that seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That is false; we can say that the Russian government is not the source.

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

Wikileaks has - we specialize in bringing the First Amendment to the world, and we were always very surprised one of our biggest battles would be trying to bring it to the United States under an Obama administration.

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

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.

To keep a person ignorant is to place them in a cage.

We have to be careful about applying criminal labels to people until we're very sure.

I enjoy crushing bastards. So it is enjoyable work.

Libya, more than anyone else's war, was Hillary Clinton's war.

This generation is burning the mass media to the ground.

We all only live once. So we are obligated to make good use of the time that we have and to do something that is meaningful and satisfying. This is something that I find meaningful and satisfying... I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards.

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

There's an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation.

There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination, in the response.

It's the world without sunlight, but I haven't seen sunlight in so long, I don't remember it.

Media is a big problem around the world, it's powerful and can abuse its power.

This movement is not about the destruction of law, but the construction of law.

To be alive as a human being is to know, in the same way as it is to have a heart that beats.

If you were following the [Barack] Obama campaign back then, closely, you could see it had become very close to banking interests. So I think you can't properly understand Hillary Clinton's foreign policy without understanding Saudi Arabia.

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.

It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on, there's always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy, and we believe that is a good thing to engage in.

Reality is an aspect of property. It must be seized. And investigative journalism is the noble art of seizing reality back from the powerful.

I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable.