Top 300 Edward Snowden Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Our founders did not write that We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal.”

— Edward Snowden

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

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

— Edward Snowden

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— 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. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

187. “Throughout all thirty-two levels, Mario exists in front of what in gaming parlance is called “an invisible wall,” which doesn’t allow him to go backward. There is no turning back, only going forward – for Mario and Luigi, for me, and for you.”

— Edward Snowden

188. “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

189. “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

190. “If at any point during your journey through this book you paused for a moment over a term you wanted to clarify or investigate further and typed it into a search engine – and if that term happened to be in some way suspicious, a term like XKEYSCORE, for example – then congrats: you’re in the system, a victim of your own curiosity.”

— Edward Snowden

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “The data we generate just by living – or just by letting ourselves be surveilled while living – would enrich private enterprise and impoverish our private existence in equal measure. If government surveillance was having the effect of turning the citizen into a subject, at the mercy of state power, then corporate surveillance was turning the consumer into a product, which corporations sold to other corporations, data brokers, and advertisers.”

— Edward Snowden

196. “The philosophy she lived by was the perfect training: say what you want, say who you are, never be ashamed. If they reject you, it’s their problem.”

— Edward Snowden

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

— Edward Snowden

198. “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

199. “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

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

— Edward Snowden