Lawrence Lessig Quotes

If you understand this refrain, you're gonna' understand everything I want to say to you today. It has four parts: Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it ., Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past ., Ours is less and less a free society.

It's clearly more fun to make the rules than to follow them.

Creative freedom is a huge carrot.

We live in a world with "free" content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We tell jokes that reference movie plots without the permission of the directors. We read our children books, borrowed from a library, without paying the original copyright holder for the performance rights.

Fashion is an imposition, a reign on freedom.

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

Weezer isn't stuck in roles, so we just do what we want to do, what makes us excited.

Who controls the present controls the past. There's a power structure, if you like, between the present and the past and the future, and that's what I'm interested in.

You carry forever the fingerprint that comes from being under someone's thumb.

Creativity is the greatest expression of liberty.

People demand freedom only when they have no power.

My definition of success is control.

Working for a magazine, you have a boss; you are not free.

Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

We can neither ignore the history of the past nor create the future.

He did not care which direction the car was travelling, so long as he was in the driver’s seat.

I have no power, no independence.

A man is the prisoner of his power.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry from the past, it can draw that only from the future. It cannot start upon its work before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the past

Gold is power Aurum est Potestas

Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before.

The more respect that objects, customs, or laws are given, the more attentively you must question the right these things have to this respect.

The exercise of authority is odious, and they who know how to govern, leave it in abeyance as much as possible.

You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.