Top 40 Daniel Ellsberg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We were young, we were foolish, we were arrogant, but we were right.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

2. “We need the courage to face the truth about what we are doing in the world and act responsibly to change it.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

3. “For an American to be patriotic is to be loyal to the principles of our Constitution, and the First Amendment. The truth is that the policies of the government is sometimes in conflict with that. In our country, patriotism should not be defined as obedience to an authority.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

4. “There should be at least one leak like the Pentagon Papers every year.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

5. “Truth-telling to Congress and the public is not disloyal in America: it is an expression of the higher loyalty officials owe to the Constitution, the rule of law, and the sovereign public. It is a courageous, patriotic, and effective way to serve our country. The time to speak out is now.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

6. “I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

7. “Look, all administrations, all governments lie, all officials lie and nothing they say is to be believed. That’s a pretty good rule.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

8. “It’s true that most people find it far more comfortable to trust an authority than to have their faith questioned.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

9. “WikiLeaks serves as a back-up for those who want to tell the truth about the inner workings of government when the mainstream media is not willing or taking too long to publish.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

10. “Only we, the public, can force our representatives to reverse their abdication of the war powers that the Constitution gives exclusively to the Congress.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

11. “If monarchy is corrupting – and it is – wait till you see what overt empire does to us.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

12. “My feelings of revulsion and foreboding about nuclear weapons had not changed an iota since 1945, and they have never left me. Since I was 14, the overriding objective of my life has been to prevent the occurrence of nuclear war.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

13. “But it is important always to keep in mind that the danger of harming humans is not connected only or even mainly with telling secrets, there can be great danger in keeping secrets.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

14. “Those of us who finally saw through the Vietnam war saw through this war, and all the actions that were necessary to end the Vietnam war will be necessary here. I think the American people will get us out of this war.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

15. “It is a tribute to the American people that our leaders perceived that they had to lie to us, it is not a tribute to us that we were so easily misled.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

16. “I agree that there are things that should be kept secret.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

17. “EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

18. “Nixon did have a secret plan, and I knew that it involved making threats of nuclear war to North Vietnam.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

19. “In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material, and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

20. “Whether rightly or wrongly, we are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing – specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction, firebombs, and atomic bombs – and believes that it was fully justified in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

21. “President Johnson put destroyers in harm’s way in the Tonkin Gulf not only once, but several times, with the, with a lot of his people hoping that it would lead to a confrontation and claiming that it had. And could have resulted in the lost of many lives in the course of it.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

22. “You needn’t think there is nothing you can do-you can tell the truth.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

23. “I asked, “How do you think that would work?” The major said, “If they didn’t get any Execute message? Oh, I think they’d come back.” Pause. “Most of them.” The last three words didn’t register with me right away because before they were out of his mouth, my head was exploding. I kept my face blank but a voice inside was screaming, “Think? You think they’d come back?!”

— Daniel Ellsberg

24. “Just like the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, any future attack by a single tactical nuclear weapon near a densely populated area would kill tens to hundreds of thousands of noncombatants, as those did. Thus, virtually any threat of first use of a nuclear weapon is a terrorist threat. Any nation making such threats is a terrorist nation. That means the United States and all its allies, including Israel, along with Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

25. “There are some things that should not be leaked without authorization.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

26. “The world has yet to absorb the lessons of this history – the story of how the existence of humanity was placed in great, unjustifiable danger by men who had no intention of doing that, men who recoiled from ending human history, or from taking what they saw as a high or even significant risk of doing so.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

27. “For every ton of bombs dropped on England in the nine months of the Blitz, England and the United States, mainly England, eventually dropped a hundred tons of bombs on German cities. More than half a million Germans – civilians – were killed.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

28. “A streetcar rattled by on the tracks as I read the headline: a single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first thought: “I know exactly what that bomb was.” It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers about the previous fall. I thought: We got it first. And we used it. On a city. I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very dangerous for humanity had just happened.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

29. “The theatrical device represented by the president’s moment-by-moment day-and-night access to the “football,” with its supposedly unique authorization codes, has always been exactly that: theater – essentially a hoax. Whatever the public declarations to the contrary, there has to be delegation of authority and capability to launch retaliatory strikes, not only to officials outside the Oval Office but outside Washington too, or there would be no real basis for nuclear deterrence.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

30. “This mortal predicament did not begin with Donald J. Trump, and it will not end with his departure. The obstacles to achieving these necessary changes are posed not so much by the majority of the American public – though many in recent years have shown dismaying manipulability – but by officials and elites in both parties and by major institutions that consciously support militarism, American hegemony, and arms production and sales.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

31. “I found draft resistors very conscientious, reasonable, and not fanatics.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

32. “City burning, in other words, was becoming something of a science.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

33. “The effect of that is to poison the flow of information to the President himself and to create a situation where a President can be almost, to use a metaphor, psychotically divorced from the realities in which he is acting...”

— Daniel Ellsberg

34. “They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?”

— Daniel Ellsberg

35. “The fact is that when it comes to judgment as to what should be secret and what should not be secret, Julian Assange’s judgment has been pretty good so far.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

36. “Seventy years of public controversy about “the decision to drop the bomb” have been almost entirely misdirected. It has proceeded on the false supposition that there was or had to be any such decision. There was no new decision to be made in the spring of 1945 about burning a city’s worth of humans.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

37. “At the end of his two terms, President Eisenhower bequeathed to the Kennedy administration eighteen thousand nuclear weapons.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

38. “The implication – never questioned by anyone at RAND while I was there – was that adequate deterrence for the United States demanded a survivable, assured second-strike capability to kill more than the twenty million Soviet citizens who had died in World War II. That meant we were working to assure the survival under attack of a capability for retaliatory genocide, though none of us ever thought of it in those terms for a moment.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

39. “The atom bomb did not start a new era of targeting or strategy or war making in the world. Annihilation of an urban civilian population by fire had already become the American way of war from the air, as it had been the British way since late 1940.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

40. “To be sure, Americans, and American Air Force planners in particular, were the only people in the world who believed that they had won a war by bombing, and, particularly in Japan, by bombing civilians. But the nuclear era eventually put that demonic temptation – to deter, defeat, or punish an adversary by an operational capability to annihilate most of its civilian population – within the reach of many nations.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

41. “Thus, virtually any threat of first use of a nuclear weapon is a terrorist threat. Any nation making such threats is a terrorist nation. That means the United States and all its allies, including Israel, along with Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea.”

— Daniel Ellsberg

42. “I was struck, in fact, by President Johnson’s reaction to these revelations as “close to treason,” because it reflected to me this sense that what was damaging to the reputation of a particular administration, a particular individual, was in effect treason, which is very close to saying “I am the state.” And I think that quite sincerely many Presidents, not only Lyndon Johnson, have come to feel that.”

— Daniel Ellsberg