Julian Assange Quotes

We need a free media, not just freedom of speech.

Vigorous independent and critical media are indispensable in a democracy.

The press must be free; it has always been so and much evil has been corrected by it. If Government finds itself annoyed by it, let it examine its own conduct and it will find the cause.

We need a free press. We must have it. It's vital.

The press in India, I believe, is more free, and happily so, than perhaps media anywhere in the world. Right? Which is a good thing.

Democracies succeed or fail based on their journalism.

A free and truly independent press - fiercely independent when necessary - is the red beating heart of freedom and democracy.

The job of media is the accountability of government.

You can't have a free democracy if you don't have a free media that can provide vital and independent information to the people.

There is nothing more important to a democracy than an active and engaged press.

Without freedom of the press, there can be no representative government.

A free, analytical and questioning press must be helped survive.

We have to protect all journalists, and journalists have to be allowed to do their jobs.

Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of achieving a free society.

Openness, transparency - these are among the few weapons the citizenry has to protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt... and that is the best thing that WikiLeaks has done.

I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that.

In emerging democracies like Russia, in authoritarian states like Iran or even Yugoslavia, journalists play a vital role in civil society. In fact, they form the very basis of those new democracies and civil societies.

Journalism is irrepressible. It can't be taken away.

I think the future of journalism is going to be a battle between caution and recklessness. And I think a little bit of recklessness is a good thing, as some of the WikiLeaks cables proved.

A free press can of course be good or bad, but most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad.

Democracy without a free press is inconceivable.

The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.

Freedom of the press is the mortar that binds together the bricks of democracy -- and it is also the open window embedded in those bricks.

In a democracy threatened by excessive secrecy and the criminalizing of news gathering, the more sunlight the better.

A free press may be good or bad, but without freedom a press can only be bad.