Ownership of Ideas Quotes

Control over the use of one's ideas really constitutes control over other people's lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.

As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no "intellectual property," and I think that all claimants to such property are theives.

A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.

If a man is keeping an idea to himself, and that idea is taken by stealth or trickery-I say it is stealing. But once a man has revealed his idea to others, it is no longer his alone. It belongs to the world.

One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

Theories are private property, but truth is common stock.

It is no monopoly in any other sense than as a man's own house is a monopoly. But a man's right to his own invention is a very different matter. It is no more a monopoly for him to possess that, than to possess his own homestead .

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.