Quotes By Jimmy Wales

To create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language - That's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal.

I think people have to recognise that the traditional modes of authority weren't that great.

I can't do anything quietly anymore.

If it isn't on Google, it doesn't exist.

Wikis and social networking are just tools.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged.

My original concept was to provide a free encyclopedia for every single person in the world.

The core of Wikipedia is something people really believe in. That is too valuable for the world to screw it up.

We don't need secrecy.

My being some kind of celebrity - not a real celebrity, isn't a welcome part of the job.

A huge amount of what goes on in the Middle East has to do with people being fed really bad information.

Mostly, I try to take a rational approach to life.

Almost anything is better than three network TV outlets completely controlling the national discourse with their nightly broadcasts. We've moved a long way from that, and that's important.

Our growth rate continues to be staggering.

We have to come together, worldwide, and 'think.' We have a tool - the internet - to let us do that. Let's use it wisely.

I have no regular schedule. I get up whenever I can.

The mainland Chinese tend to take a Chinese mainland point of view on controversial issues, and the Taiwanese take another the Taiwanese viewpoint.

Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it's a bunch of random people interacting.

People do fun and interesting things because they're fun and interesting.

There's a big tendency to gravitate toward a closed and proprietary approach too easily.

The Supreme Court has held that code is speech. And it doesn't matter that it's done on a computer or done face to face or done in a newspaper, reporting the facts of the world is protected speech.

A lot of people who work on open-source software don't mind making money elsewhere. They aren't anticommercial.

There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.

People take issue with individual aspects of Wikipedia all the time. But it's kind of hard to hate the general idea of a free encyclopedia. It's like hating kittens.

I just get up every day and do what seems like the most interesting, fun thing to do.

One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they're viewed as proprietary.

Massive numbers of people are going to come online from cultures we don't normally interact with.

What can we put into the hands of people under oppressive regimes to help them? For me, a big part of it is information, knowledge - the ability to defeat propaganda by understanding it.

I have always liked the idea of going to print because a big part of what we are about is to disseminate knowledge throughout the world and not just to people who have broadband.