“The government may be made up of clever, sensible people. But if they do not believe in basic human values, the more clever or shrewd they are the greater the tragedy they will create.”

The benign catastrophist (2003)

1900s
Source: The Irrational Knot (1905)

Source: Sense and Sensibility: The Screenplay

Alberne Leute sagen Dummheiten. Gescheite Leute machen sie.
Source: Aphorisms (1880/1893), p. 70.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
Context: Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
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.

Cited in: Robert W. Price (2001), Internet and Business, 2001-2002. p. 117
Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation and Control, 1967

Jame G. March "How Decisions Happen in Organizations"; Human-Computer Interaction, 1991, Volume 6 pp. 95-117

On Hacking (2002) http://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html <br class="br">2000s

Quotes from interviews