Top 300 Edward Snowden Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”

— Edward Snowden

Featured in: Hard Hitting Quotes, Rights Quotes

2. “Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you are being watched and recorded.”

— Edward Snowden

Featured in: IT Quotes, Intelligence Quotes, Government Quotes, Trust No One Quotes

3. “What is right is not always the same as what is legal.”

— Edward Snowden

4. “Truth is coming and it cannot be stopped.”

— Edward Snowden

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5. “A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all.”

— Edward Snowden

Featured in: Quotes About Growing Up

6. “Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.”

— Edward Snowden

7. “I would rather be without a state than without a voice.”

— Edward Snowden

8. “If you’re not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren’t real.”

— Edward Snowden

Featured in: Quotes About Acting

9. “We don’t have to ask for our privacy, we can take it back.”

— Edward Snowden

10. “Privacy is a function of liberty.”

— Edward Snowden

11. “I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act.”

— Edward Snowden

12. “The NSA and Israel wrote Stuxnet together.”

— Edward Snowden

13. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong.”

— Edward Snowden

14. “Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”

— Edward Snowden

15. “If you seek to help, join the open source community and fight to keep the spirit of the press alive and the internet free. I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.”

— Edward Snowden

16. “A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.”

— Edward Snowden

17. “Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American.”

— Edward Snowden

18. “When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right.’ You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights.”

— Edward Snowden

19. “Your rights matter, because you never know when you’re going to need them.”

— Edward Snowden

20. “There have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal. Sometimes to do the right thing you have to break the law.”

— Edward Snowden

21. “The NSA was actually concerned back in the time of the crypto-wars with improving American security. Nowadays, we see that their priority is weakening our security, just so they have a better chance of keeping an eye on us.”

— Edward Snowden

22. “My perspective is if you’re not willing to be called a few names to help out your country, you don’t care enough.”

— Edward Snowden

23. “So many of the things we’re told by the government simply aren’t true.”

— Edward Snowden

24. “All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed. That is a milestone we left a long time ago.”

— Edward Snowden

25. “You shouldn’t change your behavior because a government agency somewhere is doing the wrong thing. If you sacrifice your values because you’re afraid, you don’t care about those values very much.”

— Edward Snowden

26. “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything.”

— Edward Snowden

27. “I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American.”

— Edward Snowden

28. “If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”

— Edward Snowden

29. “I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.”

— Edward Snowden

30. “Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.”

— Edward Snowden

31. “The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change.”

— Edward Snowden

32. “We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.”

— Edward Snowden

33. “The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.”

— Edward Snowden

34. “It’s really hard to take that step-not only do I believe in something, I believe in it enough that I’m willing to set my own life on fire and burn it to the ground.”

— Edward Snowden

35. “The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.”

— Edward Snowden

36. “I went to a website the other day and right at the top of the page it showed me my ip address. It was the most disturbing moment I have ever experienced. This website even told me what internet browser I was using, and what day it was. Computers can do anything.”

— Edward Snowden

37. “The NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America.”

— Edward Snowden

38. “You shouldn’t send an email from a computer that’s associated with you if you don’t want it to be tracked back to you. You don’t want to hack the power plant from your house if you don’t want them to follow the trail back and see your IP address.”

— Edward Snowden

39. “I care more about the country than what happens to me. But we can’t allow the law to become a political weapon or agree to scare people away from standing up for their rights, no matter how good the deal. I’m not going to be part of that.”

— Edward Snowden

40. “Let’s put it this way. The United States government has assembled a massive investigation team into me personally, into my work with the journalists, and they still have no idea what documents were provided to the journalist, what they have, what they don’t have, because encryption works.”

— Edward Snowden

41. “Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we’ve been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.”

— Edward Snowden

42. “I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.”

— Edward Snowden

43. “These activities can be misconstrued, misinterpreted, and used to harm you as an individual, even without the government having any intent to do you wrong.”

— Edward Snowden

44. “The community of technical experts who really manage the internet, who built the internet and maintain it, are becoming increasingly concerned about the activities of agencies like the NSA or Cyber Command, because what we see is that defense is becoming less of a priority than offense.”

— Edward Snowden

45. “I do not expect to see home again.”

— Edward Snowden

46. “The definition of a security state is one that prioritizes security over all other considerations.”

— Edward Snowden

47. “FBI creating a world where citizens rely on Apple to defend their rights, rather than the other way around.”

— Edward Snowden

48. “The question for us is not what new story will come out next. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

— Edward Snowden

49. “We watch our own people more closely than anyone else in the world.”

— Edward Snowden

50. “There are cyber threats out there, this is a dangerous world, and we have to be safe, we have to be secure no matter the cost.”

— Edward Snowden