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 have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.
Don't let circumstances distress you. Rather, look for the will of God for your life to be revealed in and through those circumstances.
In order to taste my cup of water you must first empty your cup.
In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out.
Every object and being in the universe is a jar overflowing with wisdom and beauty,a drop of the Tigris that cannot be contained by any skin. Every jarful spills and makes the earth more shining, as though covered in satin... Make peace with the universe. Take joy in it. It will turn to gold. Resurrection will be now. Every moment, a new beauty.
To read in the Bible, as the word of God himself, that "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, ["] and to preach there-from that, "In the sweat of other mans faces shalt thou eat bread," to my mind can scarcely be reconciled with honest sincerity.
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