Politics & Power Quote by Richard Stallman

Freedom, in Stallman’s telling, isn’t a natural resource you casually inherit; it’s a system you maintain or watch degrade. The line “teaches history” is doing sly work: it pretends to be mild, almost textbook, while smuggling in an accusation. If history already taught this lesson, then indifference isn’t ignorance, it’s refusal. Stallman frames the loss of freedom not as a dramatic coup but as a slow forfeiture made possible by apathy.

The second sentence lands like a heckler’s interruption: “‘Don’t bother us with politics’…” Stallman isn’t quoting a specific person so much as ventriloquizing a familiar modern posture, the consumer’s insistence that civic conflict is an annoying pop-up ad. The subtext is that “no politics” is itself a political demand: keep the defaults, keep the power arrangements, keep the friction hidden. It’s a defense mechanism for people who benefit from the status quo or who want the comforts of a tech-driven life without the obligations of understanding who governs it.

Context matters because Stallman’s core arena was software freedom: proprietary code, surveillance, digital rights management, and the creeping normalization of user restriction sold as convenience. Read that way, “freedom” isn’t abstract patriotism; it’s the ability to inspect, modify, and control the tools that increasingly control you. His intent is recruitment-by-shame: to reclassify disengagement as complicity, and to make “politics” sound less like a dirty word than a maintenance fee for autonomy.