John Perry Barlow Quotes

John Perry Barlow presents visionary, earnest thoughts on politics, love and society that inspire a hopeful view of freedom.

42 quotes

1. TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I've ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.

2. It's a perfect set of circumstances to give us the time Yeats foretold, with the best having lost all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity. I'm an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I'm not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.

3. Everyone seems to be playing well within the boundaries of his usual rule set. I have yet to hear anyone say something that seemed likely to mitigate the idiocy of this age.

4. 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.

5. 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. I also believe that angels, or something like them, sometimes live among us, hidden within our fellow human beings. I'm convinced that such an angel dwelled in Cynthia. I felt this presence often in Cynthia's lightness of being, in her decency, her tolerance, her incredible love. I never heard Cynthia speak ill of anyone nor did I ever hear anyone speak ill of her. She gave joy and solace to all who met her.

6. With a care both conscious and reverential, Cynthia and I built a love which I believe inspired most who came near it. We felt it was our gift to the world. We wanted to show the hesitant the miracle that comes when two people give their hearts unconditionally, honestly, fearlessly, and without reservation or judgement. We wanted to make our union into a message of hope, and I believe we did, even though we knew that hearts opened so freely can be shattered if something should go wrong. As my heart is shattered now.

7. Among the waves of tragedy which have crashed on me with her death is a terror that our message of hope has been changed into a dreadful warning. But I must tell you that had I known in the beginning that I would be here today doing this terrible thing, I would still have loved her as unhesitatingly, because true love is worth any price one is asked to pay. The other message we wished to convey was one of faith in the essential goodness and purpose of life. I have always felt that no matter how inscrutable its ways and means, the universe is working perfectly and working according to a greater plan than we can know.

8. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

9. 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...

10. 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.

11. I'm a free-marketeer. I believe in free markets, but... sometimes you have things that look like free markets but aren't because of artificial reasons. I'm not very happy with the current state of what calls itself free market economy in the world because you've got all these grotesque monopolies that are able to gain [sic] the system in a way that's to their advantage by virtue of their power, and that's not a free market. A real free market has some kind of counter-veiling [sic] influence from the government to keep a monopoly in check, but this government... it's not about free marketing principles, it's about greed pure and simple. And this government wants to assure that the other people that they went to college with get just as rich as they do. This country is going to make Mexico look like Sweden inside of ten years in terms of wealth distribution, because there are no countervailing forces. They've eliminated tax basically for the ultra-rich, they've eliminated any control over monopolies, the greedy have free reign [sic] and its just going to be the super rich and the peasants.

12. I was always raised to think that Republicans were about limited government, about individual liberty, about fiscal responsibility, about balanced budgets, about a wariness of military adventures abroad, about responsible encouragement to business. There's a whole list of things I thought the Republican Party was all about, and these guys that presently occupy the White House, are categorically against every single one of those things. So if they're Republicans, I'm not. But I'm really not a very comfortable Democrat. I mean the Democrats in the last elections proved themselves to be a bunch of dithering pussies... and it was pathetic. So I'm just waiting until one party or the other actually gets a moral compass and a backbone.

13. I wasn't tempted to vote for Bush, but I understand why people did: because he obviously had integrity. It was a terrible kind of integrity, but he does what he says and he means what he says. And what he says is terrible and what he does is terrible, but he's consistent. So I think a lot of people in Wyoming who care so much about integrity that there willing to choose somebody that has a monstrous willingness to do any damn thing as long as he's up front about it - but that's not really quite enough for me. I mean I look forward to the day when I can be Republican again. I'm an Alan Simpson Republican.

14. Polyamory - that's where you're freely confessed that you have more than one lover at a time. And actually I'm less that way than I used to be, but I was trying to make people understand, that at least for some folks, this was a fairly natural state. And instead of skulking around about it that we'd all do better to avoid the deceit and be honest.

15. I think the 'counterculture' believes that there are ways to manage being the world's most powerful country that involve creation of consensus - ruling by virtuous example rather than by force of arms.

16. There are a lot of kids out there copying and distributing movies - not because they care about seeing the movies or sharing them with their friends, but because they want to stick it to the movie business.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. I ... believe that angels, or something like them, sometimes live among us, hidden within our fellow human beings.

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

22. 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.

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

24. Art is a service, not a product. Created beauty is a relationship, and a relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work to 'content' is like praying in swear words. End of Sermon. Back to business.

25. Incompetence is a double-edged banana.

26. The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.

27. 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.

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

29. The 'Total Information Awareness' project is truly diabolical - mostly because of the legal changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to all sorts of private and commercial databases that were previously off limits.

30. The Internet is the most liberating tool for humanity ever invented, and also the best for surveillance. It's not one or the other. It's both.

31. Hope does not always require probability.

32. Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions. Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate that expands with development. Imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where business you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs.

33. I support freedom of expression, no matter whose, so I oppose DDoS attacks regardless of their target... they're the poison gas of cyberspace.

34. 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.

35. If you're not lost, you're not much of an explorer.

36. With the development of the Internet...we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back farther.

37. If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.

38. 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.

39. 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.

40. Out of the ashes of the music business, comes the rebirth of the musician business.

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

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