Top 300 Edward Snowden Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “US spend more on research and development than the other countries, so we shouldn’t be making the internet a more hostile, a more aggressive territory.”

— Edward Snowden

152. “It’s becoming less and less the National Security Agency and more and more the national surveillance agency. It’s gaining more offensive powers with each passing year.”

— Edward Snowden

153. “The United States is more reliant on the technical systems. We’re more reliant on the critical infrastructure of the internet than any other nation out there. And when there’s such a low barrier to entering the domain of cyber-attacks we’re starting a fight that we can’t win.”

— Edward Snowden

154. “And that’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build and it’s not something I’m willing to live under.”

— Edward Snowden

155. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

157. “To refuse to inform yourself about the basic operation and maintenance of the equipment you depended on was to passively accept that tyranny and agree to its terms: when your equipment works, you’ll work, but when your equipment breaks down you’ll break down, too. Your possessions would possess you.”

— Edward Snowden

158. “And so the geek inherited the earth.”

— Edward Snowden

159. “We can’t permit our data to be used to sell us the very things that must not be sold, such as journalism. If we do, the journalism we get will be merely the journalism we want, or the journalism that the powerful want us to have, not the honest collective conversation that’s necessary.”

— Edward Snowden

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

165. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

167. “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

168. “I used to work for the government, but now I work for the public. It took me nearly three decades to recognize that there was a distinction, and when I did it, it got me into a bit of trouble at the office.”

— Edward Snowden

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

172. “Hacking isn’t just native to computing – it exists wherever rules do.”

— Edward Snowden

173. “To hack a system requires getting to know its rules better than the people who created it or are running it, and exploiting all the vulnerable distance between how those people had intended the system to work and how it actually works, or could be made to work. In capitalizing on these unintentional uses, hackers aren’t breaking the rules as much as debunking them.”

— Edward Snowden

174. “The government should be afraid of the people, the people shouldn’t be afraid of the government.”

— Edward Snowden

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “This fact alone virtually guaranteed technological tyranny, which was perpetuated not by the technology itself but by the ignorance of everyone who used it daily and yet failed to understand it. To refuse to inform yourself about the basic operation and maintenance of the equipment you depended on was to passively accept that tyranny and agree to its terms: when your equipment works, you’ll work, but when your equipment breaks down you’ll break down, too. Your possessions would possess you.”

— Edward Snowden

179. “Any elected government that relies on surveillance to maintain control of a citizenry that regards surveillance as anathema to democracy has effectively ceased to be a democracy.”

— Edward Snowden

180. “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

181. “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

182. “Put simply, a world in which every law is always enforced would be a world in which everyone was a criminal.”

— Edward Snowden

183. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

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

— Edward Snowden

186. “The only way I can end this book is the way I began it: with a dedication to Lindsay, whose love makes life out of exile.”

— Edward Snowden

187. “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

188. “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

189. “Technology doesn’t have a Hippocratic oath. So many decisions that have been made by technologists in academia, industry, the military, and government since at least the Industrial Revolution have been made on the basis of “can we,” not “should we.” And the intention driving a technology’s invention rarely, if ever, limits its application and use.”

— Edward Snowden

190. “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

191. “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

192. “In an authoritarian state, rights derive from the state and are granted to the people. In a free state, rights derive from the people and are granted to the state.”

— Edward Snowden

193. “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

194. “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

195. “Hemingway once wrote, the way to make people trustworthy is to trust them.”

— Edward Snowden

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

199. “At any point, for all perpetuity, any new administration – any future rogue head of the NSA – could just show up to work and, as easily as flicking a switch, instantly track everybody with a phone or a computer, know who they were, where they were, what they were doing with whom, and what they had ever done in the past.”

— Edward Snowden

200. “The NSA’s conventional wisdom was that there was no point in collecting anything unless they could store it until it was useful, and there was no way to predict when exactly that would be. This rationalization was fuel for the agency’s ultimate dream, which is permanency – to store all of the files it has ever collected or produced for perpetuity, and so create a perfect memory. The permanent record.”

— Edward Snowden