Top 300 Edward Snowden Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “When Clapper raised his hand and lied to the American public, was anyone tried? Were any charges brought? Within 24 hours of going public, I had three charges against me.”

— Edward Snowden

152. “When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.”

— Edward Snowden

153. “A battle buddy is the person who, by policy, goes everywhere you go, just as you go everywhere they go, if there’s even the remotest chance that either of you might be alone. Being alone might lead to thinking, and thinking can cause the army problems.”

— Edward Snowden

154. “A little bit of math can accomplish what all the guns and barbed wire can’t: a little bit of math can keep a secret.”

— Edward Snowden

155. “A “whistleblower,” in my definition, is a person who through hard experience has concluded that their life inside an institution has become incompatible with the principles developed in – and the loyalty owed to – the greater society outside it, to which that institution should be accountable.”

— Edward Snowden

156. “You should always let people underestimate you. Because when people misappraise your intelligence and abilities, they’re merely pointing out their own vulnerabilities – the gaping holes in their judgment that need to stay open if you want to cartwheel through later on a flaming horse, correcting the record with your sword of justice.”

— Edward Snowden

157. “Yes, man really did land on the moon. Climate change is real. Chemtrails are not a thing.”

— Edward Snowden

158. “The truth, though, is that deletion has never existed technologically in the way that we conceive of it. Deletion is just a ruse, a figment, a public fiction, a not-quite-noble lie that computing tells you to reassure you and give you comfort.”

— Edward Snowden

159. “Extreme justice can turn out to be extreme injustice, not just in terms of the severity of punishment for an infraction, but also in terms of how consistently and thoroughly the law is applied and prosecuted.”

— Edward Snowden

160. “In the centuries since the original Constitution Day, our clouds, computers, and phones have become our homes, just as personal and intimate as our actual houses nowadays. If you don’t agree, then answer me this: Would you rather let your coworkers hang out at your home alone for an hour, or let them spend even just ten minutes alone with your unlocked phone?”

— Edward Snowden

161. “Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read.”

— Edward Snowden

162. “To digitize something is to record it, in a format that will last forever.”

— Edward Snowden

163. “Peering at life through a window can ultimately abstract us from our actions and limit any meaningful confrontation with their consequences.”

— Edward Snowden

164. “The Courtship of Miles Standish by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.”

— Edward Snowden

165. “No matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become an open book.”

— Edward Snowden

166. “One thing you come to understand very quickly while using XKEYSCORE is that nearly everyone in the world who’s online has at least two things in common: they have all watched porn at one time or another, and they all store photos and videos of their family.”

— Edward Snowden

167. “A change in the law is infinitely more difficult to achieve than a change in a technological standard, and as long as legal innovation lags behind technological innovation institutions will seek to abuse that disparity in the furtherance of their interests. It falls to independent, open-source hardware and software developers to close that gap by providing the vital civil liberties protections that the law may be unable, or unwilling, to guarantee.”

— Edward Snowden

168. “The Internet I’d grown up with, the Internet that had raised me, was disappearing. And with it, so was my youth. The very act of going online, which had once seemed like a marvelous adventure, now seemed like a fraught ordeal.”

— Edward Snowden

169. “What makes a life? More than what we say; more, even, than what we do. A life is also what we love, and what we believe in.”

— Edward Snowden

170. “When I was a child, “the unforgettable experience” was not yet a threateningly literal technological description, but a passionate metaphorical prescription of significance: my first words, my first steps, my first lost tooth, my first time riding a bicycle.”

— Edward Snowden

171. “You don’t need to tell a bunch of computer whizzes that they possess superior knowledge and skills that uniquely qualify them to act independently and make decisions on behalf of their fellow citizens without any oversight or review. Nothing inspires arrogance like a lifetime spent controlling machines that are incapable of criticism.”

— Edward Snowden

172. “I was reminded of what is perhaps the fundamental rule of technological progress: if something can be done, it probably will be done, and possibly already has been.”

— Edward Snowden

173. “Some time later, I was afraid that my budding math skills had failed me, when my mental totals didn’t match those on the cash register’s display. But once again, my mother explained. “They raised the sales tax. Now you have to add four percent.” “So now the library will get even more books?” I asked. “Let’s hope,” my mother said.”

— Edward Snowden

174. “Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe.”

— Edward Snowden

175. “In the 1990s, the Internet had yet to fall victim to the greatest iniquity in digital history: the move by both government and businesses to link, as intimately as possible, users’ online personas to their offline legal identity.”

— Edward Snowden

176. “It took me until my late twenties to finally understand that so much of what I believed, or of what I thought I believed, was just youthful imprinting. We learn to speak by imitating the speech of the adults around us, and in the process of that learning we wind up also imitating their opinions, until we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that the words we’re using are our own.”

— Edward Snowden

177. “That’s the incomparable beauty of the cryptological art. A little bit of math can accomplish what all the guns and barbed wire can’t: a little bit of math can keep a secret.”

— Edward Snowden

178. “I tend to think of it as human encryption. As in any process of encryption, the original material – your core identity – still exists, but only in a locked and scrambled form.”

— Edward Snowden

179. “Grave of the Fireflies, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, The Vision of Escaflowne, Rurouni Kenshin, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Trigun, The Slayers, and my personal favorite, Ghost in the Shell.”

— Edward Snowden

180. “I had hoped to serve my country, but instead I went to work for it. This is not a trivial distinction.”

— Edward Snowden

181. “There was an utterly logical relationship between my input and the output. If my input was flawed, the output was flawed; if my input was flawless, the computer’s output was, too.”

— Edward Snowden

182. “If my input was flawed, the output was flawed; if my input was flawless, the computer’s output was too. So consistent and fair, so unequivocally unbiased. No teacher had been so patient, yet so responsive. I have never felt so in control.”

— Edward Snowden

183. “That, ultimately, is the critical flaw or design defect intentionally integrated into every system, in both politics and computing: the people who create the rules have no incentive to act against themselves.”

— Edward Snowden

184. “There is no turning back, only going forward – for Mario and Luigi, for me, and for you. Life only scrolls in one direction, which is the direction of time, and no matter how far we might manage to go, that invisible wall will always be just behind us, cutting us off from the past, compelling us on into the unknown.”

— Edward Snowden

185. “You will understand, then, when I say that the Internet of today is unrecognizable. It’s worth noting that this change has been a conscious choice, the result of a systematic effort on the part of a privileged few.”

— Edward Snowden

186. “The NSA’s surveillance programs, its domestic surveillance programs in particular, flouted the Fourth Amendment completely.”

— Edward Snowden

187. “Violence has historically proven to be the human race’s most effective means of achieving resolution. Violence is the most reliable method to make others listen, or safely deny their demands. Not to mention that in many countries, the police who enforce the law use handguns and batons, wielding violence as a tool to make arrests.”

— Edward Snowden

188. “I’d decided it was best to live in denial and just make some money, make life better for the people I loved – after all, wasn’t that what everybody else did? But it was easier said than done. The denial, I mean. The money – that came easy. So easy that I felt guilty.”

— Edward Snowden

189. “But if a leak’s harmfulness and lack of authorization, not to mention its essential illegality, make scant difference to the government’s reaction, what does? What makes one disclosure permissible, and another not? The answer is power. The answer is control. A disclosure is deemed acceptable only if it doesn’t challenge the fundamental prerogatives of an institution.”

— Edward Snowden

190. “We’d do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn’t defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends.”

— Edward Snowden

191. “Terrorism, of course, was the stated reason why most of my country’s surveillance programs were implemented, at a time of great fear and opportunism. But it turned out that fear was the true terrorism, perpetrated by a political system that was increasingly willing to use practically any justification to authorize the use of force.”

— Edward Snowden

192. “Most people, even today, tend to think of mass surveillance in terms of content – the actual words they use when they make a phone call or write an email. The unfortunate truth, however, is that the content of our communications is rarely as revealing as its other elements – the unwritten, unspoken information that can expose the broader context and patterns of behavior.”

— Edward Snowden

193. “We learn to speak by imitating the speech of the adults around us, and in the process of that learning we wind up also imitating their opinions, until we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that the words we’re using are our own.”

— Edward Snowden

194. “Prominent examples of the “Frankenstein effect” cited by after-the-fact civilian, governmental, military, and even IC assessments have included America’s funding and training of the mujahideen to fight the Soviets, which resulted in the radicalization of Osama bin Laden and the founding of al-Qaeda, as well as the de-Baathification of the Saddam Hussein–era Iraqi military, which resulted in the rise of the Islamic state.”

— Edward Snowden

195. “It’s unimaginable that a major bank or even a social media outfit would hire outsiders for systems-level work. In the context of the US government, however, restructuring your intelligence agencies so that your most sensitive systems were being run by somebody who didn’t really work for you was what passed for innovation.”

— Edward Snowden

196. “These public initiatives of mass surveillance proved, once and for all, that there could be no natural alliance between technology and government.”

— Edward Snowden

197. “Other days, I just pick up some Burger King – I know where my loyalties lie – and play games I have to pirate because I can no longer use credit cards.”

— Edward Snowden

198. “Many of the first 2,000 or so nights of my life ended in civil disobedience: crying, begging, bargaining, until – on night 2,193, the night I turned six years old – I discovered direct action. The authorities weren’t interested in calls for reform, and I wasn’t born yesterday.”

— Edward Snowden

199. “The best means we have for keeping our keys safe is called “zero knowledge,” a method that ensures that any data you try to store externally – say, for instance, on a company’s cloud platform – is encrypted by an algorithm running on your device before it is uploaded, and the key is never shared. In the zero knowledge scheme, the keys are in the users’ hands – and only in the users’ hands. No company, no agency, no enemy can touch them.”

— Edward Snowden

200. “The guy who started the Arab Spring was almost exactly my age. He was a produce peddler in Tunisia, selling fruits and vegetables out of a cart. In protest against repeated harassment and extortion by the authorities, he stood in the square and set fire to his life, dying a martyr.”

— Edward Snowden