Top 300 Edward Snowden Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

217. “Once the ubiquity of collection was combined with the permanency of storage, all any government had to do was select a person or a group to scapegoat and go searching – as I’d gone searching through the agency’s files – for evidence of a suitable crime.”

— Edward Snowden

218. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

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

— Edward Snowden

221. “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

222. “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

223. “At school I could plead my case until I lost my voice, or I could just accept the fact that I’d never had a voice to begin with.”

— Edward Snowden

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

236. “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

237. “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

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. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

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

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

— Edward Snowden

250. “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