A Quote by Stewart Brand

Information wants to be free.

Stewart Brand

Quote Topics

Free Information Wants

Quote Author

Stewart Brand
American - Author
Born: December 14, 1938

Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first.I say that information doesn't deserve to be free.Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?...Information is alienated experience.

Jaron Lanier

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.

Stewart Brand

If information wants to be free, then that's true everywhere, not just in information technology.

Mitch Kapor

Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable.

Larry Wall

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Stewart Brand

Information wants to be free. Believe it.

Bruce Sterling

Your ego wants to move through life risk-free, foolish-free, discouragement-free, mistake-free, tired-free.

Christine Kane

Information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.

Stewart Brand

It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.

Niccolo Machiavelli

The one thing that everybody wants is to be freenot to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free … The only thing that any one wants now is to be free, to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled and scared, no no, not.

Gertrude Stein

You can't have a free democracy if you don't have a free media that can provide vital and independent information to the people.

Rupert Murdoch

No entity in the history of the world has collected more information about you than Google. My office wants to know what exactly Google does with all of the information it's gathering.

Josh Hawley

I'd like to talk about free markets. Information in the computer age is the last genuine free market left on earth except those free markets where indigenous people are still surviving. And that's basically becoming limited.

Russell Means

When reporters are in the business of obtaining hard facts that service the free flow of information, journalists should have a right to obtain that information without fear of personal ruin or incarceration.

Rod Lurie

A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?