"If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"If you're not lost, you're not much of an explorer."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"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."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"Our universities are so determined to impose tolerance that they'll expel you for saying what you think and never notice the irony."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"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."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"Hope does not always require probability."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"I'm a member of that half of the human race which is inclined to divide the human race into two kinds of people. My dividing line runs between the people who crave certainty and the people who trust chance."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"Out of the ashes of the music business, comes the rebirth of the musician business."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"We are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl"
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"I have a feeling Virtual Reality will further expose the conceit that 'reality' is a fact. It will provide another reminder of the seamless continuity between the world outside and the world within, delivering another major hit to the old fraud of objectivity. 'Real,' as Kevin Kelly put it, 'is going to be one of the most relative words we'll have.'"
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"So I'm just waiting until one party or the other actually gets a moral compass and a backbone"
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"The real issue is control. The Internet is too widespread to be easily dominated by any single government. By creating a seamless global economic zone, anti-sovereign and unregulatable, the Internet calls into question the very idea of a nation-state."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"I'm still strongly opposed to antismoking laws, strongly opposed to any law that regulates personal behavior."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"Incompetence is a double-edged banana."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"One may as well be optimistic. The road to catastrophe will be rougher if it's paved with dread"
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"Notions of property, value, ownership, and the nature of wealth itself are changing more fundamentally than at any time since the Sumerians first poked cuneiform into wet clay and called it stored grain ... few people are aware of the enormity of this shift and fewer of them are lawyers or public officials."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"Humanity seems bent on creating a world economy primarily based on goods that take no material form. In doing so, we may be eliminating any predictable connection between creators and a fair reward for the utility others may find in their works."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)
"I personally think intellectual property is an oxymoron. Physical objects have a completely different natural economy than intellectual goods. It's a tricky thing to try to own something that remains in your possession even after you give it to many others."
—John Perry Barlow (1947-2018)