Top 70 Richard Stallman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sharing knowledge is the most fundamental act of friendship. Because it is a way you can give something without losing something.”

— Richard Stallman

Featured in: Knowledge Quotes, Meaningful Friendship Quotes

2. “Think ‘free speech,’ not ‘free beer.’”

— Richard Stallman

3. “Programming is not a science. Programming is a craft.”

— Richard Stallman

Featured in: Programming Quotes

4. “Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.”

— Richard Stallman

Featured in: IT Quotes

5. “Free software’ is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer’.”

— Richard Stallman

Featured in: IT Quotes, Quotes on Liberty

6. “Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.”

— Richard Stallman

7. “I did write some code in Java once, but that was the island in Indonesia.”

— Richard Stallman

8. “There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels.”

— Richard Stallman

Featured in: IT Quotes

9. “Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking.”

— Richard Stallman

10. “I have met bright students in computer science who have never seen the source code of a large program. They may be good at writing small programs, but they can’t begin to learn the different skills of writing large ones if they can’t see how others have done it.”

— Richard Stallman

Featured in: Different Quotes, Quotes About Skills

11. “Idiots can be defeated but they never admit it.”

— Richard Stallman

12. “I’m always happy when I’m protesting.”

— Richard Stallman

13. “If the users don’t control the program, the program controls the users. With proprietary software, there is always some entity, the “owner” of the program, that controls the program and through it, exercises power over its users. A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power.”

— Richard Stallman

14. “To be able to choose between proprietary software packages is to be able to choose your master. Freedom means not having a master. And in the area of computing, freedom means not using proprietary software.”

— Richard Stallman

15. “If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not enough – you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal.”

— Richard Stallman

16. “The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.”

— Richard Stallman

17. “Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Alliance.”

— Richard Stallman

18. “Paying isn’t wrong, and being paid isn’t wrong. Trampling other people’s freedom and community is wrong, so the free software movement aims to put an end to it, at least in the area of software.”

— Richard Stallman

19. “Anything that prevents you from being friendly, a good neighbour, is a terror tactic.”

— Richard Stallman

20. “Sharing is good, and with digital technology, sharing is easy.”

— Richard Stallman

21. “I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.”

— Richard Stallman

22. “The Adobe flash plug-in is non-free software, and people should not install it, or suggest installing it, or even tell people it exists.”

— Richard Stallman

23. “Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community. So it’s free as in freedom.”

— Richard Stallman

24. “You can use any editor you want, but remember that vi vi vi is the text editor of the beast.”

— Richard Stallman

25. “The GNU GPL was not designed to be “open source”.”

— Richard Stallman

26. “A commune is where people join together to share their lack of wealth.”

— Richard Stallman

27. “So, make a real effort to avoid getting sucked into all the expensive lifestyle habits of typical Americans. Because if you do that, then people with the money will dictate what you do with your life.”

— Richard Stallman

28. “Laws that oppress people have no moral authority.”

— Richard Stallman

29. “GNU, which stands for Gnu’s Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it.”

— Richard Stallman

30. “Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won’t leave you alone.”

— Richard Stallman

31. “People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.”

— Richard Stallman

32. “Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.”

— Richard Stallman

33. “While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance in technology is an opening for them to further restrict its users.”

— Richard Stallman

34. “Globalizing a bad thing makes it worse. But globalizing a good thing is usually good.”

— Richard Stallman

35. “Snow is so beautiful, it doesn’t have to be useful.”

— Richard Stallman

36. “Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results.”

— Richard Stallman

37. “I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there’s a sucker born every minute.”

— Richard Stallman

38. “It doesn’t take special talents to reproduce – even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really something to be proud of. It helps more people, too.”

— Richard Stallman

39. “Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.”

— Richard Stallman

Featured in: Programming Quotes

40. “Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air.”

— Richard Stallman

41. “The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way.”

— Richard Stallman

42. “One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control.”

— Richard Stallman

43. “All governments should be pressured to correct their abuses of human rights.”

— Richard Stallman

44. “No person, no idea, and no religion deserves to be illegal to insult, not even the Church of Emacs.”

— Richard Stallman

45. “I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way.”

— Richard Stallman

46. “If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.”

— Richard Stallman

47. “Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”

— Richard Stallman

48. “I’m trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage.”

— Richard Stallman

49. “Odious ideas are not entitled to hide from criticism behind the human shield of their believers feelings.”

— Richard Stallman

50. “I’m the last survivor of a dead culture. And I don’t really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead.”

— Richard Stallman