Quotes By Joichi Ito

I noticed that democracy was broken and tried to work on fixing that in Japan. Then I realized that it was broken all over the place and decided to work on that too.

We discussed the history of postwar Japan and how Japan had missed an opportunity to build a more functional democracy because of the focus on fighting communism driven in large part by the American occupation.

But my question is, am I compromising by adapting my words for the audience and where is the line beyond which I am not adapting words, but changing my position?

I have always viewed my role as a sort of ambassador or bridge between groups to help provide a dialog.

It would be easy to define terrorism as attacks against human rights and international humanitarian law forbids attacks against innocent non-combatants which is often the definition used for terrorism.

Money creates a power relationship between the payer and the payee.

If we destroy human rights and rule of law in the response to terrorism, they have won.

The most important thing I learned in school was how to touch type.

The US constitution's First Amendment rights only cover Americans, but I believe that in a democracy the competition of ideas and free speech should combat beliefs that it does not agree with - more speech and debate, not censorship.

When there is a huge force pressing down on freedoms, sub-cultures with more creativity and power are likely to form.

The idea of trying to fight against extremism was written off as naive.

I just believe that the cost of marketing is going to increase and the cost of delivery is going to decrease as the Net gets stronger and mass media gets weaker.

Google is in an amazing position to be the target of tons of lawsuits that will set precedent for many important things for us on the Internet.

There was a very convincing argument made that the extremists have won and the aggression is now supported by the majority, therefore fighting until surrender was the only alternative.

For some reason, I grew up generally believing that Japan and Korea were quite friendly. I do know that there is some bad history and the extremists on both sides are unreasonable.

I have had a great deal of interaction with Koreans and feel a fairly strong bond with Korea.

Most creative work is a process of people passing ideas and inspirations from the past into the future and adding their own creativity along the way.

I agree that it is not just the extremists who harbor bad thoughts or engage in bad acts, but they are usually the source of the polarization and try to keep education and communication of the main stream from moving forward.

In a world where discovery is more important than delivery, it's the people who find, remix and direct attention to old stuff that should be rewarded, not the people who deliver it or sit on it waiting for someone to show up.

Now that our media companies and it appears are policies are traded for cash, what is there to check the continuing consolidation of power and diminishing of democracy?

I definitely feel like my blog is going edgy to broad and boring.

Liberty, freedom and democracy are very fuzzy words, but human rights is very specific.

Upholding human rights is not merely compatible with fighting terrorism, it is essential.

I talked about the barriers created by monopolies. I said that it was the role of government to break up these monopolies and that we couldn't do it alone.

Internet penetration in Italy is quite low and the Berlusconi media machine controls most of what people see.

We have a long way to go before we are able to hear the voices of everyone on earth, but I believe that providing voices and building bridges is essential for the World Peace we all wish for.

We talked about the Internet and Wikipedia and how facts and history are being collectively created online.