Top 80 Lawrence Lessig Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we’ve not seen before.”

— Lawrence Lessig

2. “Money corrupts the process of reasoning.”

— Lawrence Lessig

3. “Creativity is enhanced by less-than-perfect control over what content is on the network.”

— Lawrence Lessig

4. “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.”

— Lawrence Lessig

5. “It’s fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme.”

— Lawrence Lessig

6. “Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn’t reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator.”

— Lawrence Lessig

7. “A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don’t get paid.”

— Lawrence Lessig

8. “All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations.”

— Lawrence Lessig

9. “Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device.”

— Lawrence Lessig

10. “We are on the cusp of this time where I can say, “I speak as a citizen of the world” without others saying, God, what a nut.”

— Lawrence Lessig

11. “The current term of protection for software is the life of an author plus 70 years, or, if it’s work-for-hire, a total of 95 years. This is a bastardization of the Constitution’s requirement that copyright be for “limited times.””

— Lawrence Lessig

12. “Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we’ve seen – the Internet – has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don’t get in the way of this ideology.”

— Lawrence Lessig

13. “Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.”

— Lawrence Lessig

14. “I don’t support direct democracy because I want a life, and that means I want to select people who work for me who do that sort of work for me.”

— Lawrence Lessig

15. “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.”

— Lawrence Lessig

16. “Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables.”

— Lawrence Lessig

17. “Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal.”

— Lawrence Lessig

18. “Every generation welcomes the pirates from the last.”

— Lawrence Lessig

19. “Liberty in cyberspace will not come from the absence of the state. Liberty there, as anywhere, will come from a state of a certain kind. We build a world where freedom can flourish not by removing from society any self-conscious control, but by setting it in a place where a particular kind of self-conscious control survives. We build liberty as our founders did, by setting society upon a certain constitution.”

— Lawrence Lessig

20. “In a time of polarized politics there’s one thing that more than ninety percent of Americans agree on, that our government is broken, and broken because of the money in politics.”

— Lawrence Lessig

21. “While appropriation art is critical to art, it’s an ambiguous art form in the world of the Supreme Court.”

— Lawrence Lessig

22. “I think if the copyright regime focuses on the people we are supposed to be helping, the artists and creators, and builds a system that gives them the freedom to choose and to protect and to be rewarded for their creativity, then we will have the right focus.”

— Lawrence Lessig

23. “I’m all for experimenting with sortition – randomly selected representative bodies of citizens. But I don’t favor direct democracy. We’re busy. We have lives. There is reddit. Who has time to work out the right answer to the thousand policy choices a gov’t must make all the time?”

— Lawrence Lessig

24. “The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration, but instead from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the change in copyright, produces.”

— Lawrence Lessig

25. “There is nothing more dangerous than a government of the many controlled by the few.”

— Lawrence Lessig

26. “By the time Apple’s Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited.”

— Lawrence Lessig

27. “Before the monopoly should be permitted, there must be reason to believe it will do some good – for society, and not just for monopoly holders.”

— Lawrence Lessig

28. “We established a regime that left creativity unregulated. Now it was unregulated because copyright law only covered “printing.” Copyright law did not control derivative work. And copyright law granted this protection for the limited time of 14 years.”

— Lawrence Lessig

29. “All of the great Disney works took works that were in the public domain and remixed them.”

— Lawrence Lessig

30. “Politics is that rare sport where the amateur contest is actually more interesting than the professional.”

— Lawrence Lessig

31. “If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they’re free for people to build upon as they see fit.”

— Lawrence Lessig

32. “Code plus law is combining to reduce rights consumers used to have.”

— Lawrence Lessig

33. “Freedom is about stopping the past.”

— Lawrence Lessig

34. “This does not mean that every copyright must prove its value initially. That would be a far too cumbersome system of control. But it does mean that every system or category of copyright or patent should prove its worth.”

— Lawrence Lessig

35. “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.”

— Lawrence Lessig

36. “I’m pushing for citizen equality not because of some moral idea, but because this is the essential way to crack the corruption that now makes it so Washington can’t work.”

— Lawrence Lessig

37. “I’m a lawyer. I make lawyers for a living.”

— Lawrence Lessig

38. “As I’ve indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.”

— Lawrence Lessig

39. “A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now.”

— Lawrence Lessig

40. “But, like all metaphoric wars, the copyright wars are not actual conflicts of survival. Or at least, they are not conflicts for survival of a people or a society, even if they are wars of survival for certain businesses or, more accurately, business models. Thus we must keep i mind the other values or objectives that might also be affected by this war. We must make sure this war doesn’t cost more than it is worth. We must be sure it is winnable, or winnable at a price we’re willing to pay.”

— Lawrence Lessig

41. “Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law.”

— Lawrence Lessig

42. “I don’t care if the Koch brothers or Soros spend their money to promote one candidate or another. I care about members of Congress spending 30%-70% of their time raising money from .05% of us. Change the way we fund elections and you change the corruption.”

— Lawrence Lessig

43. “If the law imposed the death penalty for parking tickets, we’d not only have fewer parking tickets, we’d also have much less driving.”

— Lawrence Lessig

44. “One great feature of modern society is the institutionalized respect we give to processes designed to destroy the past.”

— Lawrence Lessig

45. “On December 17, 1903, on a windy North Carolina beach for just shy of one hundred seconds, the Wright brothers demonstrated that a heavier-than-air, self-propelled vehicle could fly. The moment was electric and its importance widely understood. Almost immediately, there was an explosion of interest in this newfound technology of manned flight, and a gaggle of innovators began to build upon it.”

— Lawrence Lessig

46. “Companies will often use the legal system to scare people away from attacking them. But we all should be free to make critical statements about anybody, unless those statements are malicious.”

— Lawrence Lessig

47. “Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property.”

— Lawrence Lessig

48. “Free culture depends upon vibrant competition. Yet the effect of the law today is to stifle just this kind of competition. The effect is to produce an over-regulated culture, just as the effect of too much control in the market is to produce an over-regulated-regulated market.”

— Lawrence Lessig

49. “Technology means you can now do amazing things easily; but you couldn’t easily do them legally.”

— Lawrence Lessig

50. “Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again.”

— Lawrence Lessig