Jan Koum Quotes

We encounter the dilemma of freedom versus authority in all sorts of places but probably nowhere more frequently than in the area of Big Brother's ongoing efforts to protect us from ourselves – efforts that many people view as an invasion of their privacy or as infringement upon their God-given right to be stupid (though they don't usually put it that way).

We are expected to believe that anyone who objects to the Department of Homeland Security or the USA Patriot Act is a terrorist, and that the only way to preserve our freedom is to hand it over to the government for safekeeping.

There is growing use of government intrusion into your creative space…. The government is able to see more deeply into our intellectual lives.

It doesn’t keep us safe and it doesn’t keep us free if we give up our liberties to the government.

Speech is an essential mechanism of democracy, for it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people. [...] The right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus is a precondition to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it. [...] By taking the right to speak from some and giving it to others, the Government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect for the speaker’s voice. The Government may not by these means deprive the public of the right and privilege to determine for itself what speech and speakers are worthy of consideration. The First Amendment protects speech and speaker, and the ideas that flow from each.

Saying that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.

The government continues to erode our freedom.

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

To open his lips is crime in a plain citizen.

In America we can say what we think, and even if we can't think, we can say it anyhow.

Today it is becoming harder to speak out, with the inception of the Patriot Act, the president has legislated free speech to be a crime.

Chinese citizens have never had the right to really express their opinions; in the constitution it says you can, but in the real world it is more dangerous. In the west people think it's a right they're born with. Here it's a right given by the government, and one that's not really practised.

A simple way to determine whether the right to dissent in a particular society is being upheld is to apply the town square test: Can a person walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm? If he can, then that person is living in a free society. If not, it's a fear society.

I feel very sad that my personal freedom was taken away like this. I grew up under authoritarian governments in the Middle East, and one of the reasons I chose to move to the U. S. is that I didn’t want an officer to make me change my T-shirt. He said ‘You can’t wear a T-shirt with Arabic script and come to an airport. It is like wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘I am a robber’ and going to a bank.’

A government that spies on people to find out what they are thinking is a government that isn’t listing to them.

People have a right to say what they want without being killed. These Islamic groups have to be stopped. I just can't sit down and do nothing.

When people fear surveillance, whether it exists or not, they grow afraid to speak their minds and hearts freely to their government or to anyone else.

Homeland security intelligence done the wrong way will give us thought police.

I can imagine no greater disservice to the country than to establish a system of censorship that would deny to the people of a free republic like our own their indisputable right to criticize their own public officials. While exercising the great powers of the office I hold, I would regret in a crisis like the one through which we are now passing to lose the benefit of patriotic and intelligent criticism.

The surest way to make our youth suspect that there may be something in Communism would be for the government to outlaw it.

Political speech is indispensable to decision-making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation. By taking the right to speak from some and giving it to others, the Government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect for the speaker’s voice. The Government may not by these means deprive the public of the right and privilege to determine for itself what speech and speakers are worthy of consideration. The First Amendment protects speech and speaker, and the ideas that flow from each.

We cannot have a society in which some dictator somewhere can impose censorship here in the United States.

The most repressive societies have always restricted speech the most — and when people are finally able to speak, they often call for change.

Democracy depends on the idea that we hold each others’ right to express ourselves and be heard above our own desire to always get the outcomes we want. You can’t impose tolerance top-down.

You cannot prevent me from talking. I am exercising my right to free speech.