Top 300 Edward Snowden Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “This was the ultimate leap of faith, in a way: I could hardly trust anyone, so I had to trust everyone.”

— Edward Snowden

252. “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

253. “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

254. “What China was doing publicly to its own citizens, America might be – could be – doing secretly to the world.”

— Edward Snowden

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

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

— Edward Snowden

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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. American politicians weren’t as afraid of terror as they were of seeming weak, or of being disloyal to their party, or of being disloyal to their campaign donors, who had ample appetites for government contracts and petroleum products from the Middle East.”

— Edward Snowden

281. “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. This was a lesson that the US government would confirm for me in other contexts, time and again, in the years ahead.”

— Edward Snowden

282. “Direct engagement, which can be harsh and emotionally draining, simply doesn’t happen that much on the technical side of intelligence, and almost never in computing. There is a depersonalization of experience fostered by the distance of a screen. Peering at life through a window can ultimately abstract us from our actions and limit any meaningful confrontation with their consequences.”

— Edward Snowden

283. “I wanted to show that I wasn’t just a brain in a jar; I was also heart and muscle.”

— Edward Snowden

284. “I almost didn’t take my abilities seriously, and didn’t want to be praised for them or to success because of them. I’d wanted, instead, to be praised for something that was harder for me. I wanted to show that I wasn’t just a brain in a jar, I was also a heart and muscle.”

— Edward Snowden

285. “The fact is, no one with a biography like mine ever comes comfortably to autobiography. It’s hard to have spent so much of my life trying to avoid identification, only to turn around completely and share “personal disclosures” in a book.”

— Edward Snowden

286. “Extreme justice can turn out to be extreme injustice, not just in terms of the severity of punishment for an infraction, but also in terms of how consistently and thoroughly the law is applied and prosecuted. Nearly every large and long-lived society is full of unwritten laws that everyone is expected to follow, along with vast libraries of written laws that no one is expected to follow, or even know about.”

— Edward Snowden

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

292. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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