Top 300 Edward Snowden Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “The freedom of a country can only be measured by its respect for the rights of its citizens, and it’s my conviction that these rights are in fact limitations of state power that define exactly where and when a government may not infringe into that domain of personal or individual freedoms that during the American Revolution was called “liberty” and during the Internet Revolution is called “privacy.”

— Edward Snowden

207. “Lindsay’s Russian is better than mine. She also laughs more easily and is more patient and generous and kind.”

— Edward Snowden

208. “The constitutional system only functions as a whole if and when each of its three branches works as intended. When all three don’t just fail, but fail deliberately and with coordination, the result is a culture of impunity.”

— Edward Snowden

209. “Democracy could never be imposed at the point of a gun, but perhaps it could be sown by the spread of silicon and fiber.”

— Edward Snowden

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

214. “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

215. “Put simply, computers were not designed to correct mistakes, but to hide them – and to hide them only from those parties who don’t know where to look.”

— Edward Snowden

216. “The reason you’re reading this book is that I did a dangerous thing for a man in my position: I decided to tell the truth.”

— Edward Snowden

217. “This kind of change is constant, common, and human. But an autobiographical statement is static, the fixed document of a person in flux. This is why the best account that someone can ever give of themselves is not a statement but a pledge – a pledge to the principles they value, and to the vision of the person they hope to become.”

— Edward Snowden

218. “Tech people rarely, if ever, have a sense of the broader applications and policy implications of the projects to which they’re assigned. And the work that consumes them tends to require such specialized knowledge that to bring it up at a barbecue would get them disinvited from the next one, because nobody cared.”

— Edward Snowden

219. “Ultimately, every language, including English, demonstrates its culture’s relationship to power by how it chooses to define the act of disclosure. Even the nautically derived English words that seem neutral and benign frame the act from the perspective of the institution that perceives itself wronged, not of the public that the institution has failed.”

— Edward Snowden

220. “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

221. “Tonight, we’re celebrating our anniversary. Lindsay moved out here three years ago, and two years ago today, we married.”

— Edward Snowden

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

— Edward Snowden

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “America’s fundamental laws exist to make the job of law enforcement not easier but harder. This isn’t a bug, it’s a core feature of democracy.”

— Edward Snowden

229. “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

230. “They were declaring that in a truly just society the people were not answerable to the government, the government was answerable to the people.”

— Edward Snowden

231. “Two things about the NSA stunned me right off the bat: how technologically sophisticated it was compared with the CIA, and how much less vigilant it was about security in its every iteration, from the compartmentalization of information to data encryption.”

— Edward Snowden

232. “My parents would call my name to tell me to get ready for school, but I wouldn’t hear them.”

— Edward Snowden

233. “I ended my time in Intelligence convinced that my country’s operating system – its government – had decided that it functioned best when broken.”

— Edward Snowden

234. “That’s just the way the Internet works: you get curious and your fingers do the thinking for you.”

— Edward Snowden

235. “It’s one of the great chastening facts of working with systems that the part of a system that malfunctions is almost never the part in which you notice the malfunction.”

— Edward Snowden

236. “The worst-kept secret in modern diplomacy is that the primary function of an embassy nowadays is to serve as a platform for espionage. The old explanations for why a country might try to maintain a notionally sovereign physical presence on another country’s soil faded into obsolescence with the rise of electronic communications and jet-powered aircraft.”

— Edward Snowden

237. “Nobody needs to justify why they “need” a right: the burden of justification falls on the one seeking to infringe upon the right. But even if they did, you can’t give away the rights of others because they’re not useful to you. More simply, the majority cannot vote away the natural rights of the minority. 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

238. “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

239. “Even back then, I realized that any opposition to this system would be difficult, not least because getting its rules changed to serve the interests of the majority would involve persuading the rule makers to put themselves at a purposeful disadvantage. 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

240. “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

241. “That a perfectly written set of commands would perfectly execute the same operations time and again would come to seem to me – as it did to so many smart, tech-inclined children of the millennium – the one stable saving truth of our generation.”

— Edward Snowden

242. “IC directors ask Congress for money to rent contract workers from private companies, congresspeople approve that money, and then those IC directors and congresspeople are rewarded, after they retire from office, by being given high-paying positions and consultancies with the very companies they’ve just enriched. From the vantage of the corporate boardroom, contracting functions as governmentally assisted corruption. It’s America’s most legal and convenient method of transferring.”

— Edward Snowden

243. “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

244. “To grow up is to realize the extent to which your existence has been governed by systems of rules, vague guidelines, and increasingly unsupportable norms that have been imposed on you without your consent and are subject to change at a moment’s notice. There were even some rules that you’d only find out about after you’d violated them.”

— Edward Snowden

245. “It’s been six years since I came forward because I witnessed a decline in the commitment of so-called advanced governments throughout the world to protecting this privacy, which I regard – and the United Nations regards – as a fundamental human right. In the span of those years, however, this decline has only continued as democracies regress into authoritarian populism.”

— Edward Snowden

246. “NSA’s announcement of the construction of a vast new data facility in Bluffdale, Utah.”

— Edward Snowden

247. “I hadn’t given much thought to answering the question of what to do once the game was over, mainly because a winning conclusion was always so unlikely.”

— Edward Snowden

248. “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

249. “I’ve had friends tell me that you aren’t really an adult until you bury a parent or become one yourself.”

— Edward Snowden

250. “After all, the only people on these boards were the people who could be there – who wanted to be there badly enough – who had the proficiency and passion, because the Internet of the 1990s wasn’t just one click away. It took significant effort just to log on.”

— Edward Snowden