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.
I was never bitter because I believed in the man upstairs. I continue to do my best. I let someone else be bitter. If I was bitter, I was only hurting me. I prefer to remember Bill Veeck and and Jim Hegan and Joe Gordon, the good guys. There is no point in talking about the others.
Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own.
Whoever will cultivate their own mind will find full employment. Every virtue does not only require great care in the planting, but as much daily solicitude in cherishing as exotic fruits and flowers; the vices and passions (which I am afraid are the natural product of the soil) demand perpetual weeding. Add to this the search after knowledge. . . and the longest life is too short.
Afraid of decision, I buried my finer feelings in the depths of my heart and they died there.
When men are inhuman, take care not to feel towards them as they do towards other humans.
Rise above oneself and grasp the world.
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