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.
People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.
Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism. _x000D_ _x000D_ Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.
Presence is a state of inner spaciousness
I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat. I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.
Wherever you go you will find people lying to you, and as your awareness grows, you will notice that you also lie to yourself. Do not expect people to tell you the truth because they also lie to themselves. You have to trust yourself and choose to believe or not to believe what someone says to you.
Which only goes to show that the best of us must sometimes eat our words,' Dumbledore went on, smiling.
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