Top 300 Edward Snowden Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

205. “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

206. “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

207. “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

— Edward Snowden

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “We can’t erase the things that shame us, or the ways we’ve shamed ourselves, online. All we can do is control our reactions – whether we let the past oppress us, or accept its lessons, grow, and move on.”

— Edward Snowden

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

— Edward Snowden

214. “One of the most difficult trials that a child of divorce has to face is being interrogated by one parent about the new life of the other.”

— Edward Snowden

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

— Edward Snowden

216. “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

217. “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

218. “Whatever Web 1.0 might’ve lacked in user-friendliness and design sensibility, it more than made up for by its fostering of experimentation and originality of expression, and by its emphasis on the creative primacy of the individual.”

— Edward Snowden

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “This was the ultimate leap of faith, in a way: I could hardly trust anyone, so I had to trust everyone.”

— Edward Snowden

224. “After having had more blood taken from me than I’d ever imagined was in my body, I was eventually diagnosed with infectious mononucleosis. It was both a seriously debilitating and seriously humiliating illness for me to have, not least because it’s usually contracted through what my classmates called “hooking up,” and at age fifteen the only “hooking up” I’d ever done involved a modem.”

— Edward Snowden

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

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

— Edward Snowden

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

— Edward Snowden

232. “The more I came to know about the fragility of computer security, the more I worried over the consequences of trusting the wrong machine.”

— Edward Snowden

233. “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

234. “Today, I’m taking the long way around this vast strange city, trying to find some roses. Red roses, white roses, even blue violets. Any flowers I can find. I don’t know the Russian names of any of them. I just grunt and point.”

— Edward Snowden

235. “The Intelligence Community tries to inculcate in its workers a baseline anonymity, a sort of blank-page personality upon which to inscribe secrecy and the art of imposture. You train yourself to be inconspicuous, to look and sound like others. You live in the most ordinary house, you drive the most ordinary car, you wear the same ordinary clothes as everyone else. The difference is, you do it on purpose: normalcy, the ordinary, is your cover.”

— Edward Snowden

236. “Lindsay’s parents were also divorced: her mother and father lived twenty minutes apart, and as a kid Lindsay had been shuttled back and forth between them. She’d lived out of a bag.”

— Edward Snowden

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

— Edward Snowden

238. “If folks as fundamentally decent and selfless as these aren’t deemed worthy of the protection of the state, it’s because the state itself is unworthy.”

— Edward Snowden

239. “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

240. “WE LANDED AT Sheremetyevo on June 23 for what we assumed would be a twenty-hour layover. It has now dragged on for over six years. Exile is an endless layover.”

— Edward Snowden

241. “According to Maryland Criminal Law Section 10-501, adultery is illegal and punishable by a $10 fine.”

— Edward Snowden

242. “To refuse to claim your privacy is actually to cede it, either to state trespassing its constitutional restraints or to a “private” business.”

— Edward Snowden

243. “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

244. “The attempts by elected officials to delegitimize journalism have been aided and abetted by a full-on assault on the principle of truth. What is real is being purposefully conflated with what is fake, through technologies that are capable of scaling that conflation into unprecedented global confusion.”

— Edward Snowden

245. “Everyone has something, some compromising information buried among their bytes – if not in their files then in their email, if not in their email then in their browsing history. And now this information was being stored by the US government.”

— Edward Snowden

246. “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

247. “Of course, Mae could’ve paid me in smiles – because I was smitten, just totally in love with her.”

— Edward Snowden

248. “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

249. “But there’s always a danger in letting even the most qualified person rise too far, too fast, before they’ve had enough time to get cynical and abandon their idealism.”

— Edward Snowden

250. “Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanisms by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science is, in fact, anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation.”

— Edward Snowden