Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lawrence Lessig
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 3
Computer Scientist
Jurist
Lawyer
Non-Fiction Writer
Political Activist
Politician
Professor
Teacher
Rapid City
South Dakota
Larry Lessig
Lester Lawrence Lessig III
Funders
Hostage
Representatives
Held
System
Work
Long

More quotes by Lawrence Lessig

Image
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
Image
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
Image
Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property.
Lawrence Lessig
Image
While appropriation art is critical to art, it's an ambiguous art form in the world of the Supreme Court.
Lawrence Lessig
Image
Winner take all does not exist in the Constitution. It's a restriction imposed on the electors by the states.
Lawrence Lessig
Image
Creativity is enhanced by less-than-perfect control over what content is on the network.
Lawrence Lessig
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Under the principle of equality, we should get as close to respecting equal votes of every citizen as we can, given our constitutional structure. And I think if we did that, then the will of the people would not be overturned.
Lawrence Lessig
Image
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
Image
One great feature of modern society is the institutionalized respect we give to processes designed to destroy the past.
Lawrence Lessig
Image
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
Image
We always build on the past the past always tries to stop us.
Lawrence Lessig
Image
The war against illegal file-sharing is like the church's age-old war against masturbation. It's a war you just can't win.
Lawrence Lessig
Image
There is nothing more dangerous than a government of the many controlled by the few.
Lawrence Lessig
Image
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
Image
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
Image
But it is as silly to think about peer-to-peer as applying just to music as it would have been to think about the Internet as applying just to pornography. Whatever the initial use of the technology, it has nothing to do with the potential of the architecture to serve many other extremely important functions.
Lawrence Lessig
Image
So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in ideas that we don't even notice how monstrous it is to deny ideas to a people who are dying without them.
Lawrence Lessig