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.
Interpretation
Power should come with transparency to prevent abuse, but transparency shouldn't diminish those without power.
Julian Assange emphasizes the need for transparency as a safeguard against the potential abuse of power. He suggests that while those in power must be held accountable through transparency, we must also be cautious not to strip away the agency of those who lack power by demanding excessive scrutiny of their actions or privacy, which can lead to further oppression.
In practice
In a discussion about government surveillance, one might quote Assange to highlight the balance needed between transparency and personal privacy.
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.
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.
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.
The full impact of the Lobachevskian method of challenging axioms has probably yet to be felt. It is no exaggeration to call Lobachevsky the Copernicus of Geometry [as did Clifford], for geometry is only a part of the vaster domain which he renovated; it might even be just to designate him as a Copernicus of all thought.
Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time.
To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.
People who can be very good can be very bad too.
Deep down there was understanding, not of the facts of our lives so much as of our essential natures.
History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.
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