9 Lawrence Lessig Quotes on Politics

Lawrence Lessig quotes on politics

1. When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.

5. A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt. The 'taken for granted' is the test of sanity; 'what everyone knows' is the line between us and them. This means that sometimes a society gets stuck. Sometimes these unquestioned ideas interfere, as the cost of questioning becomes too great. In these times, the hardest task for social or political activists is to find a way to get people to wonder again about what we all believe is true. The challenge is to sow doubt.

27. It's insane. It's extreme. It's controlled by political interests. It has no justification in the traditional values that justify legal regulation. And we've done nothing about it. We're bigger than they are. We've got rights on our side. And we've done nothing about it. We let them control this debate. Here's the refrain that leads to this: They win because we've done nothing to stop it.

28. J. C. Watts is the only black member of the Republican Party in leadership. He's going to resign from Congress. He's been there seven and a half years. He's had enough. Nobody can believe it. Nobody in Washington can believe it... In an interview two days ago, Watts said, Here's the problem with Washington: 'If you are explaining, you are losing.' If you are explaining, you're losing. It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem. Six years after this battle began, we're still explaining. We're still explaining and we are losing. They frame this as a massive battle to stop theft, to protect property... They extend copyrights perpetually. They don't get how that in itself is a form of theft. A theft of our common culture. We have failed in getting them to see what the issues here are and that's why we live in this place where a tradition speaks of freedom and their controls take it away.

30. This is not a left and right issue. This is the important thing to recognize: This is not about conservatives versus liberals. In our case, in Eldred, we have this brief filed by 17 economists, including Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, Ronald Kost, Ken Arrow, you know, lunatics, right? Left-wing liberals, right? Friedman said he'd only join if the word 'no-brainer' existed in the brief somewhere, like this was a complete no-brainer for him. This is not about left and right. This is about right and wrong. That's what this battle is.

40. The most powerful and sexy and well loved of lobbies really has as its aim not the protection of 'property' but the rejection of a tradition. Their aim is not simply to protect what is theirs. Their aim is to assure that all there is is what is theirs. It is not hard to understand why the warriors take this view. It is not hard to see why it would benefit them if the competition of the public domain tied to the Internet could somehow be quashed.

42. When it has become silly to suppose that the role of our government should be to 'seek balance,' then count me with the silly, for that means that this has become quite serious indeed. If it should be obvious to everyone that the government does not seek balance, that the government is simply the tool of the most powerful lobbyists, that the idea of holding the government to a different standard is absurd, that the idea of demanding of the government that it speak truth and not lies is just naive, then who have we, the most powerful democracy in the world, become?

43. It might be crazy to expect a high government official to speak the truth. It might be crazy to believe that government policy will be something more than the handmaiden of the most powerful interests. It might be crazy to argue that we should preserve a tradition that has been part of our tradition for most of our history - free culture. If this is crazy, then let there be more crazies. Soon.

45. We Americans have a long history of fighting 'big,' wisely or not. That we could be motivated to fight 'big' again is not something new. It would be something new, and something very important, if an equal number could be rallied to fight the increasing extremism built within the idea of 'intellectual property.' Not because balance is alien to our tradition; indeed, as I've argued, balance is our tradition. But because the muscle to think critically about the scope of anything called 'property' is not well exercised within this tradition anymore. If we were Achilles, this would be our heel. This would be the place of our tragedy.