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For people could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words. But they could not escape scent. For scent was a brother of breath. Together with breath it entered human beings, who could not defend themselves against it, not if they wanted to live. And scent entered into their very core, went directly to their hearts, and decided for good and all between affection and contempt, disgust and lust, love and hate. He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men.

— Perfume by Patrick Süskind

Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction.

— Free Software, Free Society by Richard Stallman

"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.

— Free Software, Free Society by Richard Stallman

Since the age of Reagan, the greatest scarcity in the United States is not technical innovation, but rather the willingness to work together for the public good. It makes no sense to encourage the former at the expense of the latter.

— Free Software, Free Society by Richard Stallman

Giving up causes psychosocial harm—to the spirit of self-reliance. It is demoralizing to live in a house that you cannot rearrange to suit your needs.

— Free Software, Free Society by Richard Stallman

It ought to be possible for me to pursue my studies and researches in one house, and for the Buddhist to spin his wheel in another. But contempt for the intellect has a strange way of not being passive.

— God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens

Sigmund Freud was quite correct to describe the religious impulse, in The Future of an Illusion, as essentially ineradicable until or unless the human species can conquer its fear of death and its tendency to wish-thinking.

— God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens

Religion is scapegoating writ large.

— God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens