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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

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

— Edward Snowden

232. “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

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. “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. A website that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Hayden isn’t offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion.”

— Edward Snowden

235. “During that seven-year stint, however, I participated in the most significant change in the history of American espionage – the change from the targeted surveillance of individuals to the mass surveillance of entire populations. I helped make it technologically feasible for a single government to collect all the world’s digital communications, store them for ages, and search through them at will.”

— Edward Snowden

236. “They’d call my name to tell me to wash up for dinner, but I’d pretend not to hear them.”

— Edward Snowden

237. “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

238. “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

239. “During my stint in Geneva, whenever a CO would ask me if there was a safer, faster, and all-around more efficient way to do this, I introduced them to Tor.”

— Edward Snowden

240. “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

241. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

243. “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

244. “But for one brief and beautiful stretch of time – a stretch that, fortunately for me, coincided almost exactly with my adolescence – the Internet was mostly made of, by, and for the people.”

— Edward Snowden

245. “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

246. “Which means that if you’re reading this now – this sentence – on any sort of modern machine, like a smartphone or tablet, they can follow along and read you.”

— Edward Snowden

247. “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

248. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

250. “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