157 Quotes by Richard Stallman

In terms of effect on the world, it’s very good that I’ve lived. And so I guess, if I could go back in time and prevent my birth, I wouldn’t do it. But I sure wish I hadn’t had so much pain.

Free software’ is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer’.

The principal lesson of Emacs is that a language for extensions should not be a mere “extension language”. It should be a real programming language, designed for writing and maintaining substantial programs. Because people will want to do that!

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.

If in my lifetime the problem of non-free software is solved, I could perhaps relax and write software again. But I might instead try to help deal with the world’s larger problems. Standing up to an evil system is exhilarating, and now I have a taste for it.

There is no system but GNU and Linux is one of it’s kernels.

Control over the use of one’s ideas really constitutes control over other people’s lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.

Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn’t all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.

Writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that’s good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better.