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.
Interpretation
Knowledge empowers individuals to take control of their own lives.
This quote from Julian Assange emphasizes the importance of being well-informed and educated as a way to maintain autonomy and avoid being dominated by others. It suggests that ignorance leads to dependence on those who may manipulate or control without the benefit of the ignorant individual's consent or understanding.
In practice
In a speech about education reform, one could say, 'As Julian Assange pointed out, we must choose to be informed citizens rather than depend on others.'
The greater the power, the more need there is for transparency, because if the power is abused, the result can be so enormous. On the other hand, those people who do not have power, we mustn't reduce their power even more by making them yet more transparent.
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.
Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love.
The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.
Strenuous intellectual work and the study of God's Nature are the angels that will lead me through all the troubles of this life with consolation, strength, and uncompromising rigor.
God does not judge us by the multitude of works we perform, but how well we do the work that is ours to do. The happiness of too many days is often destroyed by trying to accomplish too much in one day. We would do well to follow a common rule for our daily lives--DO LESS, AND DO IT BETTER.
It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others.
I think judicial temperament is a willingness to step back from your own committed views of the correct jurisprudential approach and evaluate those views in terms of your role as a judge. It's the difference between being a judge and being a law professor.
Industry, thrift and self-control are not sought because they create wealth, but because they create character.
The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person.
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