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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

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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
Politics
Money
Government
Polarized
Thing
Ninety
Time
Agree
Americans
Broken
Percent

More quotes by Lawrence Lessig

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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
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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
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One great feature of modern society is the institutionalized respect we give to processes designed to destroy the past.
Lawrence Lessig
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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
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When government disappears, its not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.
Lawrence Lessig
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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
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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
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Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt.
Lawrence Lessig
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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
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I think the archaic idea is actually winner take all, because the principle of one person, one vote is a principle that was introduced as a fundamental principle in American law in 1962, long after states had moved to one person, one vote.
Lawrence Lessig
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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
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While appropriation art is critical to art, it's an ambiguous art form in the world of the Supreme Court.
Lawrence Lessig
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[Conservatives] go to church, they do lots of things for free for each other. They hold potluck dinners. ... They serve food to poor people. They share, they give, they give away for free. It's the very same people leading Wall Street firms who, on Sundays, show up and share.
Lawrence Lessig
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Money corrupts the process of reasoning.
Lawrence Lessig
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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
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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
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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
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All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations.
Lawrence Lessig
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Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property.
Lawrence Lessig
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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