Julian Assange quotes

Julian Assange is an Australian journalist, publisher, and activist, best known as the founder of WikiLeaks. His organization published classified documents that sparked global debates on transparency, privacy, and government accountability. He has faced legal battles and international controversy due to his work. Here are 114 of his quotes:

The goal is justice, the method is transparency. It's important not to confuse the goal and the method. (Julian Assange)
You can't publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism. View quote
Julian Assange
It is impossible to correct abuses unless we know that they're going on. View quote
Julian Assange
Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture them. View quote
Julian Assange
Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism. View quote
Julian Assange
Seeing ongoing political reforms that have a real impact on people all over the world is extremely satisfying. But we want every person who's having a dispute with their kindergarten to feel confident about sending us material. View quote
Julian Assange
That's arguably what spy agencies do - high-tech investigative journalism. It's time that the media upgraded its capabilities along those lines. View quote
Julian Assange
I may be a chauvinist pig of some sort, but I'm no rapist. View quote
Julian Assange
If wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth. View quote
Julian Assange
I often say that censorship is always a cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care what people think. View quote
Julian Assange
Large newspapers are routinely censored by legal costs. It is time this stopped. It is time a country said, enough is enough, justice must be seen, history must be preserved, and we will give shelter from the storm. (Julian Assange)
It is the media that controls the boundaries of what is politically permissible, so better to change the media. Profit motives work against it, but if we can have the audience understand that most other forms of journalism are not credible, then it may be a forced move. View quote
Julian Assange
WikiLeaks will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than WikiLeaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, former African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon. View quote
Julian Assange
I would be happy to accept asylum, political asylum, in India - a nation I love. In return, I will bring Mayawati a range of the finest British footwear. View quote
Julian Assange
You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion. View quote
Julian Assange
The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. View quote
Julian Assange
I never had a mentor. I was forced to make myself up as I went along. View quote
Julian Assange
The sense of perspective that interaction with multiple cultures gives you I find to be extremely valuable, because it allows you to see the structure of a country with greater clarity, and gives you a sense of mental independence. You're not swept up in the trivialities of a nation. You can concentrate on the serious matters. View quote
Julian Assange
The final nail in the coffin was that I went to the hundredth anniversary of physics at the ANU. There were some 1500 visitors there - four Nobel prize winners - and every goddamn one of them was carting around, on their backs, a backpack given to them by the Defence Science Technology Organisation. At least it was an Australian defence science organisation. And there was just something about their attire, and the way they moved their bodies, and of course the bags on their backs didn't help much either. I couldn't respect them as men. View quote
Julian Assange
I think that the instincts human beings have are actually much better than the societies that we have. View quote
Julian Assange
Whether it is being just a company or "more than just a company," Google's geopolitical aspirations are firmly enmeshed within the foreign-policy agenda of the world's largest superpower. (Julian Assange)
You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you. View quote
Julian Assange
I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination. View quote
Julian Assange
In the history of Wikileaks, nobody has claimed that the material being put out is not authentic. View quote
Julian Assange
Power is mostly the illusion of power. The Pentagon demanded we destroy our publications. We kept publishing. Clinton denounced us and said we were an attack on the entire "international community". We kept publishing. I was put in prison and under house arrest. We kept publishing. We went head to head with the NSA getting Edward Snowden out of Hong Kong, we won and got him asylum. Clinton tried to destroy us and was herself destroyed. Elephants, it seems, can be brought down with string. Perhaps there are no elephants. View quote
Julian Assange