Aaron Swartz Quotes

The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.

The people who exercise the power are not always the same people over whom it is exercised.

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

If we live in a world where information drives what we do, the information we get becomes the most important thing. The person who chooses that information has power.

People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.

The less people know about what is going on, the easier it is to wield power and authority.

Part of understanding power is understanding the limits of power.

White men have too many chiefs.

Knowledge is a form of power and most institutions exhibit an understandable reluctance to dissipate this power in the absence of compensating advantages

There's a lot that's wrong with the way we work - bad habits that develop around control of information, people hoarding information as a means of preserving their own power. When you're using Slack, everyone can see what's going on because the default mode is public.

As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.

The value systems of those with access to power and of those far removed from such access cannot be the same. The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.

What we really need to be understanding is that all of these things matter and they all stem from the fact that certain people live with power and authority and they want to maintain it.

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.

In an ideal world, an individual's institutional power would be correlated perfectly with his or her value-add. In practice, this is seldom the case.

Anything can be used for or against the welfare of women - or the welfare of anyone - depending on who controls it.

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.

Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.

If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.

The real problem is that the way that power is given out in our society pits us against each other.

There are two things that interest me - and they're both power, ultimately. One is not having it and one is abusing it.

Each one of our ideas should benefit the people with less power than us.

Justice often means taking power from some who have it and giving it to some who do not.

Power is dangerous for those who do not have it.

The primary object of every elite, or ruling class, is to maintain its own power and privilege.