Julian Assange

Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.

Reality is an aspect of property. It must be seized. And investigative journalism is the noble art of seizing reality back from the powerful.

Courage is not the absence of fear. Only fools have no fear. Rather, courage is the intellectual mastery of fear by understanding the true risks and opportunities of the situation and keeping those things in balance

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.

In my role as Wikileaks editor, I've been involved in fighting off many legal attacks. To do that, and keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions.

We get information in the mail, the regular postal mail, encrypted or not, vet it like a regular news organization, format it - which is sometimes something that's quite hard to do, when you're talking about giant databases of information - release it to the public and then defend ourselves against the inevitable legal and political attacks.

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.

Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.

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.

Cryptography is the essential building block of independence for organisations on the Internet, just like armies are the essential building blocks of states, because otherwise one state just takes over another.

Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior.

The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.

Journalism should be more like science. As far as possible, facts should be verifiable. If journalists want long-term credibility for their profession, they have to go in that direction. Have more respect for readers.

You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.

Opponents past and present have the same essential weakness about them: first they want to use you, then they want to be you, then they want to snuff you out.

Google's colourful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under six billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a year - an opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history.

Power is a thing of perception. They don't need to be able to kill you. They just need you to think they are able to kill you

The internet has become a political space. I think that is one of the most important developments in the past decade.