Top 300 Edward Snowden Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.”

— Edward Snowden

52. “There are proxies, proxy servers on the internet, and this is very typical for hackers to use. They create what are called proxy chains where they gain access to a number of different systems around the world, sometimes by hacking these, and they use them as sort of relay boxes.”

— Edward Snowden

53. “Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.”

— Edward Snowden

54. “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things.”

— Edward Snowden

55. “America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.”

— Edward Snowden

56. “Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn’t feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.”

— Edward Snowden

57. “There are times throughout history and it doesn’t take long for either an American or a German, to think about times in the history of their country where the law provided the Government to do things which were not right.”

— Edward Snowden

58. “I took what I knew to the public, so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice.”

— Edward Snowden

59. “I don’t think there’s anything, any threat out there today that anyone can point to, that justifies placing an entire population under mass surveillance.”

— Edward Snowden

60. “When you use any kind of internet based capability, any kind of electronic capability, to cause damage to a private entity or a foreign nation or a foreign actor, these are potential acts of war.”

— Edward Snowden

61. “The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.”

— Edward Snowden

62. “I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

— Edward Snowden

63. “We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes.”

— Edward Snowden

64. “We need to put the security back in the National Security Agency. We can’t have the national surveillance agency.”

— Edward Snowden

65. “There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny – they should be setting the example of transparency.”

— Edward Snowden

66. “I’m still alive, and I don’t lose sleep because I have done what I feel I needed to do, it was the right thing to do and I am not going to be afraid.”

— Edward Snowden

67. “There’s no saving me.”

— Edward Snowden

68. “I’ve been a spy for almost all of my adult life – I don’t like being in the spotlight.”

— Edward Snowden

69. “When the lights go out at a power plant sometime in the future, we’re going to know that that’s a consequence of deprioritizing defense for the sake of an advantage in terms of offense.”

— Edward Snowden

70. “As a general rule, US-based multinationals should not be trusted until they prove otherwise. This is sad, because they have the capability to provide the best and most trusted services in the world if they actually desire to do so.”

— Edward Snowden

71. “We have seen enough criminality on the part of government. It is hypocritical to make this allegation against me. They have narrowed the public sphere of influence.”

— Edward Snowden

72. “Cyber Command is supposed to be defending our critical infrastructure at home, but they are spending so much time looking at how to attack networks, how to break systems, and how to turn things off. I don’t think it adds up as representing a defensive team.”

— Edward Snowden

73. “It’s important to remember when you start doing things like attacking hospitals through the internet, when you start attacking things like internet exchange points, when something goes wrong, people can die. If a hospital’s infrastructure is affected, lifesaving equipment turns off.”

— Edward Snowden

74. “Citizens have to fight suppression of information on matters of vital public importance. To tell the truth is not a crime.”

— Edward Snowden

75. “I don’t want to hide. If I get arrested, I get arrested.”

— Edward Snowden

76. “We should never allow computers to make inherently governmental decisions in terms of the application of military force, even if that’s happening on the internet.”

— Edward Snowden

77. “We have to be able to reject disproportionate and unjustified responses in the cyber domain just as we do in the physical domain.”

— Edward Snowden

78. “The most important thing to the United States is not being able to attack our adversaries, the most important thing is to be able to defend ourselves. And we can’t do that as long as we’re subverting our own security standards for the sake of surveillance.”

— Edward Snowden

79. “I have had no contact with the Chinese government. I only work with journalists.”

— Edward Snowden

80. “The majority of terrorist attacks that have been disrupted in the United States have been disrupted due to things like the Time Square bomber, who was caught by a hotdog vendor, not a mass surveillance program, not a cyber-espionage campaign.”

— Edward Snowden

81. “There’s no question that the US is engaged in economic spying. If there’s information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security of the United States, they’ll go after that information and they’ll take it.”

— Edward Snowden

82. “The only thing I fear is the harmful effects on my family, who I won’t be able to help any more. That’s what keeps me up at night.”

— Edward Snowden

83. “When you are subverting the power of government, that’s a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.”

— Edward Snowden

84. “It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised – and it should be.”

— Edward Snowden

85. “We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.”

— Edward Snowden

86. “Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten – and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.”

— Edward Snowden

87. “Ending mass surveillance of private phone calls under the Patriot Act is a historic victory for the rights of every citizen. Yet while we have reformed this one program, many others remain.”

— Edward Snowden

88. “The work of a generation is beginning here, with your hearings, and you have the full measure of my gratitude and support.”

— Edward Snowden

89. “I think the public still isn’t aware of the frequency with which the cyber-attacks, as they’re being called in the press, are being used by governments around the world, not just the US.”

— Edward Snowden

90. “I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

— Edward Snowden

91. “I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”

— Edward Snowden

92. “You can show a guy sort of peeking over the wall, you can see a guy tunneling underneath, you can see a guy going through the front door. All of those, in cyber terms, are vulnerabilities, because it’s not that you have to look for one hole of a specific type. It’s the whole paradigm.”

— Edward Snowden

93. “Acting Government officials, they said they wanted – they would be happy, they would love to put a bullet in my head, to poison me as I was returning from the grocery store, and have me die in the shower.”

— Edward Snowden

94. “The United States need to put internet processes, policies, and procedures in place with real laws that forbid going beyond the borders of what’s reasonable to ensure that the only time that we and other countries around the world exercise these authorities are when it is absolutely necessary.”

— Edward Snowden

95. “US has to be able to rely on a safe and interconnected internet in order to compete with other countries.”

— Edward Snowden

96. “It’s critical how we want to use these spy programs, these electronic capabilities, where we want to draw the line, and who should approve these programs, these decisions, and at what level, for engaging in operations that could lead us as a nation into a war.”

— Edward Snowden

97. “I’m not a spy for Russia or China or any other country for that matter.”

— Edward Snowden

98. “What has a great value to us as a nation is the internet itself. The internet is critical infrastructure to the United States. We use the internet for every communication that businesses rely on every day.”

— Edward Snowden

99. “If the Obama administration responds with an even harsher hand against me, they can be assured that they’ll soon find themselves facing an equally harsh public response.”

— Edward Snowden

100. “America should be cooling down the tensions in the internet, making it a more trusted environment, making it a more secure environment, making it a more reliable environment, because that’s the foundation of our economy and our future.”

— Edward Snowden