“The masses are only to be regarded as one of three things: either as copies of great personalities, bad copies, clumsily produced in a poor material, or as foils to the great, or finally as their tools”

Nobel Address (1991)
Context: I began my book about perestroika and the new thinking with the following words: "We want to be understood". After a while I felt that it was already happening. But now I would like once again to repeat those words here, from this world rostrum. Because to understand us really — to understand so as to believe us — proved to be not at all easy, owing to the immensity of the changes under way in our country. Their magnitude and character are such as to require in-depth analysis. Applying conventional wisdom to perestroika is unproductive. It is also futile and dangerous to set conditions, to say: We'll understand and believe you, as soon as you, the Soviet Union, come completely to resemble "us", the West.
No one is in a position to describe in detail what perestroika will finally produce. But it would certainly be a self-delusion to expect that perestroika will produce "a copy" of anything.

Source: Death on the Air and Other Stories

"Copying Is Not Theft - let the re-recording begin! (15 December 2009) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djVaJN0f0VQ ; also quoted in "Calling All Musicians: Can You Arrange This Song?" at QuestionCopyright.org http://questioncopyright.org/copying_isnt_theft ·  "We Are Creators Too: Nina Paley " (2009) — introduced by Paley singing a variant of the first stanza of her song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uN7upUXSFk · "Copying Is Not Theft - Official Version" (1 April 2010) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4
Context: Copying is not theft
Stealing a thing leaves one less left
Copying it makes one thing more
That's what copying's for.
Copying isn't theft
If I copy yours, you have it too
One for me and one for you
That's what copies can do.
If I steal your bicycle,
You have to take the bus
But if I just copy it,
There's one for each of us!
Making more of a thing
That is what we call copying
Sharing ideas with everyone
That's why copying...
... Is fun!

William Burges "Art and Religion", in: The Church and the World: Essays on Questions of the Day, Orby Shipley ed., London, 1868, pp. 574-98; As cited in: John Pemble. Venice rediscovered. Clarendon Press, 16 mrt. 1995. p. 133

This is a favorite phrase of Jobs, but he is (mis)quoting Pablo Picasso. "Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal" is similarly attributed to Igor Stravinsky, but both sayings may well originate in T. S. Eliot's dictum http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Wood/Philip_Massinger: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn."
Misattributed

Compare: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." T. S. Eliot, in Philip Massinger, in The Sacred Wood (1920)
Disputed

Attributed to Auguste Rodin by Isadora Duncan, As quoted in Modern Dancing and Dancers (1912) by John Ernest Crawford Flitch, p. 105.
1900s-1940s

Os Bruzundangas (1923)

"A mysterious message millionaire" in China Daily (12 January 2009) http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2009-01/12/content_7388202.htm