Quotes from John Perry Barlow

The Internet amplifies power in all respects. It can grossly exaggerate the power of the individual.

So I'm just waiting until one party or the other actually gets a moral compass and a backbone.

The entertainment industry is as it always has been. It's a rough bunch of people and a rough industry.

God's jokes are the soul's curriculum.

Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.

I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

Hope does not always require probability.

The Internet may well disempower the nation state, but at the same time, it also strengthens certain specific state functions - like surveillance. As a political entity, it doesn't empower the nation sate. It creates the availability of much more data than the digestive system of the nation state could possibly assimilate.

I think that humor is part of what saves us from despair.

The government targets 'Anonymous' for the same reason it targets al-Qaida - because they're the enemy.

You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

I personally think intellectual property is an oxymoron. Physical objects have a completely different natural economy than intellectual goods.

It's widely assumed that you can't compete with free, and that seems like a reasonable thing to think. But this has not been my experience.

Google, Amazon, Apple. Any number of cloud providers and computer service providers who can increasingly limit your access to your own information, control all your processing, take away your data if they want to, and observe everything you do; in a way, that does give them some leverage over your own life.

The one thing that I know government is good for is countervailing against monopoly. It's not great at that either, but it's the only force I know that is fairly reliable.

Most scientific revelations happened after the pursuit of knowledge quit being secret and hermetic.

It didn't matter what we did or where we did it as long as we were together. We knew we'd found what most people either pursue in years of futile search or dismiss as a fantasy at the outset: the missing half of ourselves. The real thing.

Any powerful technology has sauce for the goose and the gander... It's just an extension of humanity.

Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.

I don't know that I believe in the supernatural, but I do believe in miracles, and our time together was filled with the events of magical unlikelihood.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge.

Our universities are so determined to impose tolerance that they'll expel you for saying what you think and never notice the irony

Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.