Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Julian Assange

Australian Editor, Activist, Publisher and Journalist, Editor-in-Chief and Founder of WikiLeaks

"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."

"Actually getting documents is not so hard, the problem is publishing them and keeping them up in the face of attacks -both economic and legal."

"All governments, all industries. We accept all material of diplomatic, historical or ethical significance that hasn?t been released before and is under active suppression. There?s a question about which industries have the greatest potential for reform. Those may be the ones we haven?t heard about yet. So what?s the big thing around the corner? The real answer is I don?t know. No one in the public knows. But someone on the inside does know."

"And if we are to produce a more civilized society, a more just society, it has to be based upon the truth. Because judgments which are not based upon the truth can only lead to outcomes which are themselves false."

"And they were to forge the paperwork, allow the Red Cross through, that they had certain sections that were 'show prisons'."

"All media is going on to the internet. All old media and new media."

"And now we see that the function of censorship has also been privatized. And what that means is that litigious billionaires and big companies are able to effectively prevent certain things appearing in public. Or reduce the number of those things appearing in public by using the legal system or by using patronage networks and economic flows to make it unprofitable to talk about certain things most of the time."

"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."

"And while some people have to be public, what we really encourage is for other people to not be martyrs but to give us material. Keep your job, sit down and relax, let us do the work. We'll protect you as best we can and we have never lost anyone so far."

"As we?ve gotten more successful, there?s a gap between the speed of our publishing pipeline and the speed of our receiving submissions pipeline. Our pipeline of leaks has been increasing exponentially as our profile rises, and our ability to publish is increasing linearly."

"And when this came out the spokesperson for Guantanamo Bay denied the whole thing and said 'That was then, it's all changed.' And as a result of that another source came forward and gave us the next year's manual and showed no actually it had gotten worse."

"Because what most people get is news that comes from press releases. Or it's news that even comes from a human rights organization that is writing news in part to tell you something but also in part to keep its funding. And that most information that comes to you is targeted at you. It is designed in some small way to manipulate you, so it is a deviation from the truth."

"But we discovered something. Our one hope against total domination. A hope that with courage, insight and solidarity we could use to resist. A strange property of the physical universe that we live in. The universe believes in encryption. It is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it."

"Big Brother is home. He is installed in the item you just dragged home from the Apple store."

"But the internal documents of major corporations and intelligence agencies and governments are designed for their internal use. For some internal process that is occurring, some internal logistical structure. They're not designed to manipulate you. And because of that difference in perceived audience you can start to see how major organizations work, and it's not how people think they work -it's something different."

"Censorship in the West is also a problem. And censorship in the West is used to legitimize censorship in other countries."

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

"Courage is an intellectual mastery of fear. It's not that you don't have fear, you just manage your risks intelligently."

"Consistency was a matter of style and values-not where you parked your car."

"Documents like this perform a legitimate role, even if it's not something you can see occurring in public."

"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. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice. If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find. If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whos hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes. The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I cannot escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them."

"Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media."

"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."

"Gag orders are easy to deal with, we just need somewhere in the world that is happy to reveal the gag order about somewhere else in the world."

"How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined? It's disgraceful."

"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."

"I have enough anger to last me 100 years. But I will channel that into my work."

"I don't think it's possible for systematic administrative injustice to occur without written records."

"I think that the only effective defense against the coming surveillance dystopia is one where you take steps yourself to safeguard your privacy. Because there?s no incentive for self-restraint by the people that have the capacity to intercept everything."

"I would be happy to accept asylum, political asylum, in India ? a nation I love. In return, I will bring Mayawati a range of the finest British footwear."

"I never had a mentor. I was forced to make myself up as I went along."

"I thought I was hard bitten and cynical and had seen a lot of the world, but what I discovered is that actually I was very ignorant. And what most people see is an illusion."

"I?m sure he?ll tell you [legendary hacker Peiter Zatko aka ?Mudge?] China spies on the U.S., Russia, France. There are genuine concerns about those powers exfiltrating data. And it?s possibly ethical to combat that process. But spying is also stabilizing to relationships. Your fears about where a country is or is not are always worse than the reality. If you only have a black box, you can put all your fears into it, particularly opportunists in government or private industry who want to address a problem that may not exist. If you know what a government is doing, that can reduce tensions."

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

"In this broader framework of what we do it is to try and build an historical record, an intellectual record, of how civilization actually works in practice."

"If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whose hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes."

"If tribunals try to hide their sources of funding then at the very outset we have to be suspicious about their conclusions."

"If we don't have Western countries as a beacon on the hill for enlightenment values what countries are left to hold that value?"

"If you feel like you're about to be injuncted give us the material and tell us when you're publishing it and we'll publish it at the same time. And that will undermine the attempt to take it down."

"If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find."

"In fact the exchange rates of Western countries are pumped up by the looting and thievery from the developing world."

"In all these cases there's complex layers as to why people do things. Including attacks on us which seem like they might backfire but actually are in deeper analysis are a forced move by intelligence agencies or corporations or groups of lawyers that have attempted to sue us in different jurisdictions."

"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."

"In the history of Wikileaks, nobody has claimed that the material being put out is not authentic."

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

"It is our task to find secret abuse plans and expose them where they can be opposed before they're implemented. Because if they're exposed by the implementation -by people suffering from that abuse- then the abuse has already occurred and it's too late."

"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."

"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."

"It is the media that controls the boundaries of what is politically permissible, so better to change the media. Profit motives work against it, but if we can have the audience understand that most other forms of journalism are not credible, then it may be a forced move."

"It is impossible to correct abuses unless we know that they're going on."