Top 300 Edward Snowden Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 6 of 7

251. “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

252. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

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

— Edward Snowden

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “Therein lies the project’s irony: here was a US military–developed technology that made cyberintelligence simultaneously harder and easier, applying hacker know-how to protect the anonymity of IC officers, but only at the price of granting that same anonymity to adversaries and to average users across the globe. In this sense, Tor was even more neutral than Switzerland.”

— Edward Snowden

266. “We are the first people in the history of the planet for whom this is true, the first people to be burdened with data immortality, the fact that our collected records might have an eternal existence. This is why we have a special duty. We must ensure that these records of our pasts can’t be turned against us, or turned against our children.”

— Edward Snowden

267. “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

268. “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

269. “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

— Edward Snowden

270. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

272. “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

273. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

275. “The 2008 crisis, which laid so much of the foundation for the crises of populism that a decade later would sweep across Europe and America, helped me realize that something that is devastating for the public can be, and often is, beneficial to the elites.”

— Edward Snowden

276. “It’s this egalitarian nature of hacking – which doesn’t care who you are, just how you reason – that makes it such a reliable method of dealing with the type of authority figures so convinced of their system’s righteousness that it never occurred to them to test it.”

— Edward Snowden

277. “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

278. “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

279. “When we’ve got these people who have practically limitless powers within a society, if they get a pass without so much as a slap on the wrist, what example does that set for the next group of officials that come into power? To push the lines a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further, and we’ll realize that we’re no longer citizens – we’re subjects.”

— Edward Snowden

280. “Please produce an autobiographical statement of no fewer than 1,000 words.”

— Edward Snowden

281. “The internet showed me the sheer quantity and variety of talent that existed, and made clear that in order to flourish I had to specialise.”

— Edward Snowden

282. “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

283. “From 2007 to 2009, I was stationed at the US Embassy in Geneva as one of the rare technologists deployed under diplomatic cover, tasked with bringing the CIA into the future by bringing its European stations online, digitizing and automating the network by which the US government spied.”

— Edward Snowden

284. “I’d wake the computer up and go online, holding my pillows against the machine to stifle the dial tone of the modem and the ever-intensifying hiss of its connection.”

— Edward Snowden

285. “The program’s very existence was an indication that the agency’s mission had been transformed, from using technology to defend America to using technology to control it by redefining citizens’ private Internet communications as potential signals intelligence.”

— Edward Snowden

286. “Nothing I could come up with would have raised even an iota of eyebrow from investigators who are used to finding out that the middle-aged analyst at a think tank likes to wear diapers and get spanked by grandmothers in leather.”

— Edward Snowden

287. “I can still feel it – the present-tense emptiness every time my call was dropped by an overloaded cell network, and the gradual realization that, cut off from the world and stalled bumper to bumper, even though I was in the driver’s seat, I was just a passenger.”

— Edward Snowden

288. “I was outraged, yes, but that was only the beginning of a process in which my heart completely defeated my rational judgment. I accepted all the claims retailed by the media as facts, and I repeated them as if I were being paid for it.”

— Edward Snowden

289. “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

290. “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

291. “But even if you didn’t search for anything online, it wouldn’t take much for an interested government to find out that you’ve been reading this book. At the very least, it wouldn’t take much to find out that you have it, whether you downloaded it illegally or bought a hard copy online or purchased it at a brick-and-mortar store with a credit card.”

— Edward Snowden

292. “It was as if whatever individual politics I’d developed had crashed – the anti-institutional hacker ethos instilled in me online, and the apolitical patriotism I’d inherited from my parents, both wiped from my system – and I’d been rebooted as a willing vehicle of vengeance. The sharpest part of the humiliation comes from acknowledging how easy this transformation was, and how readily I welcomed it. I wanted, I think, to be part of something.”

— Edward Snowden

293. “The languages of regimes like Russia and China, for their part, employ terms that bear the pejorative sense of “snitch” and “traitor.” It would take the existence of a strong free press in those societies to imbue those words with a more positive coloration, or to coin new ones that would frame disclosure not as a betrayal but as an honorable duty.”

— Edward Snowden

294. “Instead, I was resolved to bring to light a single, all-encompassing fact: that my government had developed and deployed a global system of mass surveillance without the knowledge or consent of its citizenry.”

— Edward Snowden

295. “IC, which tends to focus less on deniability and more on never getting caught in the first place. Instead, the primary purpose served by IC contracting is much more mundane: it’s a workaround, a loophole, a hack that lets agencies circumvent federal caps on hiring.”

— Edward Snowden

296. “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

297. “In fact, many of the rights most cherished by citizens of democracies aren’t even provided for in law except by implication.”

— Edward Snowden

298. “America must have a greater commitment to justice than it does simply to the law.”

— Edward Snowden

299. “As the years go by, it has become increasingly apparent to me that legislatively reforming the surveillance regime of the country of my birth won’t necessarily help a journalist or dissident in the country of my exile, but an encrypted smartphone miht.”

— Edward Snowden

300. “America’s Founders were skilled engineers of political power, particularly attuned to the perils posed by legal subterfuge and the temptations of the presidency toward exercising monarchical authority.”

— Edward Snowden