Richard Stallman Quotes

It was on a bulletin board that I first learned about hacker culture, the 'Let's just break through this wall and see what's on the other side' mentality.

A hacker to me is someone creative who does wonderful things.

To be a hacker - when I use the term - is somebody who is creative and does wonderful things.

I've never really been associated with the hackers very much. I am sympathetic to them. I understand how their mind works. It's like a child that is born and wants to explore every little - open up every little drawer there is and find out how the world works.

My primary goal of hacking was the intellectual curiosity, the seduction of adventure.

Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.

I met a lot of hackers, and some of them were very arrogant. They thought I was stupid because I couldn't follow what they were talking about. But then I met this great guy whom companies hire to find their security holes, and he was very good about explaining so I could understand.

Hackers often describe what they do as playfully creative problem solving.

Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.

What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.

I got so passionate about technology. Hacking to me was like a video game. It was about getting trophies. I just kept going on and on, despite all the trouble I was getting into, because I was hooked.

I characterize myself as a retired hacker. I'm applying what I know to improve security at companies.

As a young boy, I was taught in high school that hacking was cool.

At the end of the day, my goal was to be the best hacker.

If Anonymous and Lulzsec are the id of hacking, then physical hackerspaces are the heart of the higher-minded hacking ideals: freedom of information, meritocracy of ideas, a joy of learning and anti-authoritarianism.

I don't hate technology, I don't hate hackers, because that's just what comes with it, without those hackers we wouldn't solve the problems we need to solve, especially security.

Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.

There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.

I just couldn't make the grade as a hack-that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.

When you're attacking a router on the internet, and you're doing it remotely, it's like trying to shoot the moon with a rifle. Everything has to happen exactly right. Every single variable has to be controlled and precisely accounted for. And that's not possible to do when you have limited knowledge of the target you're attacking.

Hacking is very interesting. Once they hack, if you don't catch them in the act, you're not going to catch them.

An artist's job is to surprise himself. Use all means possible.

I don't see writing as a communication of something already discovered, as "truths" already known. Rather, I see writing as a job of experiment. It's like any discovery job; you don't know what's going to happen until you try it.

Somebody said that writers are like otters... Otters, if they do a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they'll do a better trick or a different trick because they'd already done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us get pretty bored doing the same trick. We've done it, so let's do something different.

I was playing with sound like I would have played with pots and pans as a kid.