Top 300 Edward Snowden Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “That’s just the way the Internet works: you get curious and your fingers do the thinking for you.”

— Edward Snowden

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

265. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

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

— Edward Snowden

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

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

— Edward Snowden

300. “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