Top 120 Bruce Schneier Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Security is a process, not a product.”

— Bruce Schneier

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2. “If something is free, you’re not the customer; you’re the product.”

— Bruce Schneier

3. “If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems and you don’t understand the technology.”

— Bruce Schneier

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4. “Amateurs hack systems, professionals hack people.”

— Bruce Schneier

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5. “Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.”

— Bruce Schneier

6. “People often represent the weakest link in the security chain and are chronically responsible for the failure of security systems.”

— Bruce Schneier

7. “Terrorism is a crime against the mind. We win by refusing fear.”

— Bruce Schneier

8. “Data is the pollution problem of the information age, and protecting privacy is the environmental challenge.”

— Bruce Schneier

9. “The mantra of any good security engineer is: ‘Security is a not a product, but a process.’ It’s more than designing strong cryptography into a system; it’s designing the entire system such that all security measures, including cryptography, work together.”

— Bruce Schneier

10. “Privacy is a fundamental human need.”

— Bruce Schneier

11. “The more technological a society is, the greater the security gap is.”

— Bruce Schneier

12. “The question to ask when you look at security is not whether this makes us safer, but whether it’s worth the trade-off.”

— Bruce Schneier

13. “Complexity is the worst enemy of security, and our systems are getting more complex all the time.”

— Bruce Schneier

14. “More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk.”

— Bruce Schneier

15. “There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files.”

— Bruce Schneier

16. “Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect. It is about choice, and having the power to control how you present yourself to the world.”

— Bruce Schneier

17. “Hardware is easy to protect: lock it in a room, chain it to a desk, or buy a spare. Information poses more of a problem. It can exist in more than one place; be transported halfway across the planet in seconds; and be stolen without your knowledge.”

— Bruce Schneier

18. “Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet.”

— Bruce Schneier

19. “Metadata equals surveillance; it’s that simple.”

— Bruce Schneier

20. “In the 17th century, the French statesman Cardinal Richelieu famously said, “Show me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough therein to hang him.” Lavrentiy Beria, head of Joseph Stalin’s secret police in the old Soviet Union, declared, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Both were saying the same thing: if you have enough data about someone, you can find sufficient evidence to find him guilty of something.”

— Bruce Schneier

21. “Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.”

— Bruce Schneier

22. “For many organizations, security comes down to basic economics. If the cost of security is less than the likely cost of losses due to lack of security, security wins. If the cost of security is more than the likely cost of losses, accept the losses.”

— Bruce Schneier

23. “There’s an entire flight simulator hidden in every copy of Microsoft Excel 97.”

— Bruce Schneier

24. “If someone steals your password, you can change it. But if someone steals your thumbprint, you can’t get a new thumb. The failure modes are very different.”

— Bruce Schneier

25. “Cryptography products may be declared illegal, but the information will never be.”

— Bruce Schneier

26. “In 2014, former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden remarked, “We kill people based on metadata.”

— Bruce Schneier

27. “The user’s going to pick dancing pigs over security every time.”

— Bruce Schneier

28. “People don’t understand computers. Computers are magical boxes that do things. People believe what computers tell them.”

— Bruce Schneier

29. “The fundamental driver in computer security, in all of the computer industry, is economics. That requires a lot of re-education for us security geeks.”

— Bruce Schneier

30. “It’s certainly easier to implement bad security and make it illegal for anyone to notice than it is to implement good security.”

— Bruce Schneier

31. “Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy.”

— Bruce Schneier

32. “If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get amateur security.”

— Bruce Schneier

33. “A colleague once told me that the world was full of bad security systems designed by people who read Applied Cryptography.”

— Bruce Schneier

34. “Technical problems can be remediated. A dishonest corporate culture is much harder to fix.”

— Bruce Schneier

35. “Data is the exhaust of the information age.”

— Bruce Schneier

36. “Surveillance makes us feel like prey, just as it makes the surveillors act like predators.”

— Bruce Schneier

37. “The most common misconception about privacy is that it’s about having something to hide. “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide,” the saying goes, with the obvious implication that privacy only aids wrongdoers.”

— Bruce Schneier

38. “When a big company lays you off, they often give you a year’s salary to ‘go pursue a dream.’ If you’re stupid, you panic and get another job. If you’re smart, you take the money and use the time to figure out what you want to do next.”

— Bruce Schneier

39. “The bargain you make, again and again, with various companies is surveillance in exchange for free service.”

— Bruce Schneier

40. “I tell people if it’s in the news don’t worry about it. Because by definition news is something that almost never happens.”

— Bruce Schneier

41. “Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.”

— Bruce Schneier

42. “As former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata you don’t really need content.”

— Bruce Schneier

43. “It is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics.”

— Bruce Schneier

44. “Think of your existing power as the exponent in an equation that determines the value of information. The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data.”

— Bruce Schneier

45. “No one can duplicate the confidence that RSA offers after 20 years of cryptanalytic review.”

— Bruce Schneier

46. “We no longer know whom to trust. This is the greatest damage the NSA has done to the Internet, and will be the hardest to fix.”

— Bruce Schneier

47. “The more we expect technology to protect us from people in the same way it protects us from nature, the more we will sacrifice the very values of our society in futile attempts to achieve this security.”

— Bruce Schneier

48. “Corporate and government surveillance aren’t separate; they’re an alliance of interests.”

— Bruce Schneier

49. “Surveillance is the business model of the Internet.”

— Bruce Schneier

50. “When my mother gets a prompt ‘Do you want to download this?’ she’s going to say yes. It’s disingenuous for Microsoft to give you all of these tools with which to hang yourself, and when you do, then say it’s your fault.”

— Bruce Schneier