Top 80 Lawrence Lessig Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Lawrence Lessig

53. “A culture without property, or in which creators can’t get paid, is anarchy, not freedom.”

— Lawrence Lessig

54. “There is still the illusion that if we could declare corporations are not people or that money is not speech, all would be solved. Regardless of the good in those ideas, it wouldn’t.”

— Lawrence Lessig

55. “A world where Congressmen spend 30 to 70 percent of their time raising money from a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1% is a world where that tiny, tiny fraction has enormous power. And it’s that inequality in political power that enables this corrupted system to happen.”

— Lawrence Lessig

56. “In the 1970s, 3 percent of retiring members became lobbyists. Thirty years later, that number has increased by an order of magnitude. Between 1998 and 2004, more than 50 percent of senators and 42 percent of House members made that career transition.”

— Lawrence Lessig

57. “I am a big supporter of experiments to complement representative gov’t with randomly selected representative bodies of citizens, sure. I think most Americans would be surprised to learn just how much better we are at gov’t than our gov’t.”

— Lawrence Lessig

58. “Change the way we fund campaigns. Until we do, Wall Street will always be able to blackmail the Dems and GOP to giving them what Wall Street wants.”

— Lawrence Lessig

59. “Show me why your regulation of culture is needed. Show me how it does good. And until you can show me both, keep your lawyers away.”

— Lawrence Lessig

60. “Permission from the government is an expensive commodity. New ideas rarely have this kind of support. Old ideas often have deep legislative connections to defend them against the new.”

— Lawrence Lessig

61. “Believing we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution lives. These changes will end the revolution.”

— Lawrence Lessig

62. “Monopoly controls have been the exception in free societies; they have been the rule in closed societies.”

— Lawrence Lessig

63. “We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us.”

— Lawrence Lessig

64. “When you think about a presidential candidate spending all of his or her time talking to that tiny, tiny fraction of us who have the capacity to fund political elections, it’s obvious why the perspective of government is skewed relative to what most Americans care about.”

— Lawrence Lessig

65. “You and I both know that as long as our representatives are held hostage to their funders – and their funders are not all of us – our system will not work.”

— Lawrence Lessig

66. “But it is to say that a basic idea of a representative democracy – one that argues over fundamental choices of policy, through the battle between differently committed representatives – is not the reality of our democracy anymore. We’ve settled into what Francis Fukuyama calls a “vetocracy,” where change of almost any kind, whether from the Right or the Left, is practically always stopped.”

— Lawrence Lessig

67. “If there were two candidates, a Democrat and a Republican, who each committed to the same kind of fundamental reform, then the election would be an election between the vice presidential candidates. It’d be just like the regular election, except it would be one step down.”

— Lawrence Lessig

68. “And with a practice of writing comes a certain important integrity. A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing in writing why A leads to B.”

— Lawrence Lessig

69. “Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt.”

— Lawrence Lessig

70. “I’m focused on solving the problem that would make it plausible for gov’t to get back to solving real problems.”

— Lawrence Lessig

71. “When government disappears, its not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.”

— Lawrence Lessig

72. “So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in culture that we don’t even question when the control of that property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture democratically.”

— Lawrence Lessig

73. “Legislation needs a better reason than that lawyers like it, and that America does it.”

— Lawrence Lessig

74. “We take this for granted in America today: a democracy in which the first test of credibility is not votes, or broad public support, but money.”

— Lawrence Lessig

75. “While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible.”

— Lawrence Lessig

76. “We have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying.”

— Lawrence Lessig

77. “If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before because there are no formalities.”

— Lawrence Lessig

78. “I advocate for protecting the liberty of the net, and securing privacy. I argue against people who believe both are somehow given automatically. They’re not.”

— Lawrence Lessig

79. “Code will be a central tool in this analysis. It will present the greatest threat to both liberal and libertarian ideals, as well as their greatest promise. We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental. Or we can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear. There is no middle ground. There is no choice that does not include some kind of building. Code is never found; it is only ever made, and only ever made by us.”

— Lawrence Lessig

80. “Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process.”

— Lawrence Lessig

81. “Some may not like the Constitution’s requirements, but that doesn’t make the Constitution a pirate’s charter.”

— Lawrence Lessig

82. “While control is needed, and perfectly warranted, our bias should be clear up front: Monopolies are not justified by theory; they should be permitted only when justified by facts. If there is no solid basis for extending a certain monopoly protection, then we should not extend that protection.”

— Lawrence Lessig

83. “For however much the state may gain by not having to fund roads on its own, society would lose in aggregate if the open commons of transportation were lost.”

— Lawrence Lessig