Top 30 Aaron Swartz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Think deeply about things. Don’t just go along because that’s the way things are or that’s what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think.”

— Aaron Swartz

Featured in: Reflection Quotes, Knowledge Quotes, Smart Quotes, Quotes for Better Decisions, Quotes About Ideas

2. “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.”

— Aaron Swartz

3. “I don’t want to be happy. I just want to change the world.”

— Aaron Swartz

4. “Creativity comes from applying things you learn in other fields to the field you work in.”

— Aaron Swartz

5. “There is no justice in following unjust laws.”

— Aaron Swartz

Featured in: Resistance Quotes, Principles And Laws

6. “Reality is painful – it’s so much easier to keep doing stuff you know you’re good at or else to pick something so hard there’s no point at which it’s obvious you’re failing – but it’s impossible to get better without confronting it.”

— Aaron Swartz

7. “Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.”

— Aaron Swartz

Featured in: Quotes About Greed

8. “Most people’s major life changes don’t come from reading an article in the newspaper; they come from reading longer-form essays or thoughtful books, which are much more convincing and detailed.”

— Aaron Swartz

9. “Books are totally useless unless you take their advice. If you just keep reading them, thinking “that’s so insightful! that changes everything,” but never actually doing anything different, then pretty quickly the feeling will wear off and you’ll start searching for another book to fill the void.”

— Aaron Swartz

10. “No, you can’t force other people to change. You can, however, change just about everything else. And usually, that’s enough.”

— Aaron Swartz

11. “Real education is about genuine understanding and the ability to figure things out on your own; not about making sure every 7th grader has memorized all the facts some bureaucrats have put in the 7th grade curriculum.”

— Aaron Swartz

12. “The adults were completely wrong.”

— Aaron Swartz

13. “Steadfastness is a noble quality, but unguided by knowledge or humility, it becomes rashness, or obstinacy.”

— Aaron Swartz

Featured in: Quality Quotes, Humility Quotes, Understanding Quotes

14. “As the Internet breaks down the last justifications for a professional class of politicians, it also builds up the tools for replacing them.”

— Aaron Swartz

15. “There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.”

— Aaron Swartz

16. “Now everyone has a license to speak, it’s a question of who gets heard.”

— Aaron Swartz

17. “With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge – we’ll make it a thing of the past.”

— Aaron Swartz

18. “Being around some of the bright lights of the technology world and having them expect great things helps you sit down and do it seriously.”

— Aaron Swartz

19. “I’m a teenage kid who’s interested in improving the world.”

— Aaron Swartz

20. “Geeks seem a lot more willing to treat people based on what they can do rather than who they are.”

— Aaron Swartz

21. “The law about what is stealing is very clear. Stealing is taking something away from someone so they cannot use it. There’s no way that making a copy of something is stealing under that definition.”

— Aaron Swartz

22. “Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.”

— Aaron Swartz

23. “On the one hand, I want to be very open about everything, On the other, I heavily defend people’s right to privacy.”

— Aaron Swartz

24. “The people rose up, and they caused a sea change in Washington.”

— Aaron Swartz

25. “Growing up, I slowly had this process of realizing that all the things around me that people had told me were just the natural way things were, the way things always would be, they weren’t natural at all. They were things that could be changed, and they were things that, more importantly, were wrong and should change, and once I realized that, there was really no going back.”

— Aaron Swartz

26. “The scary thing is that the more open our markets get, the faster people can move their money around and the more trading is based on this kind of speculation instead of serious analysis. And that’s scary because – recall – the whole point of the stock market is to decide the crucial question of what we, as a society, should build for the future. As Keynes says, “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

— Aaron Swartz

27. “You only get to see your own perspective. And even our mistakes make sense from our perspective – we see all of the context, everything that led up to it. It all makes sense because we saw it happen. When we screw up, it’s for a reason. When other people screw up, it’s because they’re screwups.”

— Aaron Swartz

28. “Transparency can be a powerful thing, but not in isolation. So, let’s stop passing the buck by saying our job is just to get the data out there and it’s other people’s job to figure out how to use it. Let’s decide that our job is to fight for good in the world. I’d love to see all these amazing resources go to work on that.”

— Aaron Swartz

29. “All censorship should be deplored.”

— Aaron Swartz

30. “In other words, instead of providing a place for a group of like-minded people to come together, magazines provide a sampling of what a group of like-minded people might say in such an instance so that you can pretend you’re part of them.”

— Aaron Swartz

31. “The director J. D. Walsh says good stories should be like the poster for Transformers. There’s a huge evil robot on the left side of the poster and a huge, big army on the right side of the poster. And in the middle, at the bottom, there’s just a small family trapped in the middle. Big stories need human stakes.”

— Aaron Swartz