Top 60 Glenn Greenwald Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Transparency is for those who carry out public duties and exercise public power. Privacy is for everyone else.”

— Glenn Greenwald

2. “A key purpose of journalism is to provide an adversarial check on those who wield the greatest power by shining a light on what they do in the dark, and informing the public about those acts.”

— Glenn Greenwald

3. “Privacy is a core condition of being a free person.”

— Glenn Greenwald

4. “American political culture quickly and always outpaces any attempt to satirize it.”

— Glenn Greenwald

5. “The ultimate test of a society’s freedom is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens; it’s how it treats its dissidents.”

— Glenn Greenwald

6. “If you remove the fear of criminal punishment for the nation’s political and financial elites – as we have done – what possible constraint on their behavior does anyone think will remain?”

— Glenn Greenwald

7. “Incestuous, homogeneous fiefdoms of self-proclaimed expertise are always rank-closing and mutually self-defending, above all else.”

— Glenn Greenwald

8. “The promise of the Internet has always been that it was gonna be this unprecedentedly potent instrument of liberation and democratization. It would let you explore things and meet people who you wouldn’t otherwise get to know, in completely free and unconstrained ways.”

— Glenn Greenwald

9. “The genius of America’s endless war machine is that, learning from the unpleasantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible.”

— Glenn Greenwald

10. “The definition of an extreme authoritarian is one who is willing blindly to assume that government accusations are true without any evidence presented or opportunity to contest those accusations.”

— Glenn Greenwald

11. “It is simply an invariable truth in the history of politics, in the history of government, that whenever a new power is acquired in the name of some threat, it always – not sometimes, not often, not usually -it always extends beyond its original application, beyond its original justification.”

— Glenn Greenwald

12. “You can’t have a pristine house with ten dogs, and I’d rather have the ten dogs.”

— Glenn Greenwald

13. “We should not be comfortable or content in a society where the only way to remain free of surveillance and repression is if we make ourselves as unthreatning, passive, and compliant as possible.”

— Glenn Greenwald

14. “Significant and seemingly impossible social and political change happens more often than we think, and it happens more rapidly than we realize. Even the most momentous change is always possible if one finds the right way to make it happen.”

— Glenn Greenwald

15. “The fact that war is the word we use for almost everything – on terrorism, drugs, even poverty – has certainly helped to desensitize us to its invocation; if we wage wars on everything, how bad can they be?”

— Glenn Greenwald

16. “A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.”

— Glenn Greenwald

17. “The mythology of the Reagan presidency is that he induced the collapse of the Soviet Union by luring it into unsustainable military spending and wars: should there come a point when we think about applying that lesson to ourselves?”

— Glenn Greenwald

18. “When someone who wields political power does something you dislike or disagree with, it’s incumbent upon you to object, criticize, and demand a different course. Those who refuse to do so are abdicating the most basic duty of citizenship and rendering themselves impotent.”

— Glenn Greenwald

19. “It’s common to go from ‘crashing the gate’ to guarding it.”

— Glenn Greenwald

20. “The hallmark of an authoritarian idiot is yelling TERRORIST-LOVER! at anyone questioning the definition of Terrorist.”

— Glenn Greenwald

21. “An elite class that is free to operate without limits – whether limits imposed by the rule of law or fear of the responses from those harmed by their behavior – is an elite class that will plunder, degrade, and cheat at will, and act endlessly to fortify its own power.”

— Glenn Greenwald

22. “What keeps a person passive and compliant,” he explained, “is fear of repercussions, but once you let go of your attachment to things that don’t ultimately matter – money, career, physical safety – you can overcome that fear.”

— Glenn Greenwald

23. “The many pro-surveillance advocates I have debated since Snowden blew the whistle have been quick to echo Eric Schmidt’s view that privacy is for people who have something to hide. But none of them would willingly give me the passwords to their email accounts, or allow video cameras in their homes.”

— Glenn Greenwald

24. “I’d like to vote for the candidate similar to the one the Right absurdly claims Obama is.”

— Glenn Greenwald

25. “I don’t have a ‘side’ – I’m responsible for what I say and nothing else.”

— Glenn Greenwald

26. “History shows that the mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent. A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.”

— Glenn Greenwald

27. “Terrorism’: the word that means nothing, yet justifies everything.”

— Glenn Greenwald

28. “The more fear confrontational activism can put into the heart of the political class, the better.”

— Glenn Greenwald

29. “A lot of these people are Iraqis fighting for control of their own government. Maybe there’s an argument to make that outside forces that go in and start bombing that country or invading that country are actually terrorists more so than the people in the country.”

— Glenn Greenwald

30. “You can offer the ability to citizens to choose from one of the two parties and elect their leaders as much as you want. But “democracy” is an illusion – a sham – if the most significant acts taken by those leaders are kept concealed from the citizenry.”

— Glenn Greenwald

31. “A president who is burdened with a failed and unpopular war, and who has lost the trust of the country, simply can no longer govern. He is destined to become as much a failure as his war.”

— Glenn Greenwald

32. “To permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination.”

— Glenn Greenwald

33. “Nobody really even knows with whom the US is at war, or where. Everyone just knows that it is vital that it continue in unlimited form indefinitely.”

— Glenn Greenwald

34. “It’s hard to imagine a more potent sign of a weak, declining empire than having one’s national ‘credibility’ depend upon periodically bombing other countries.”

— Glenn Greenwald

35. “Fearlessness can be its own form of power.”

— Glenn Greenwald

36. “When poor and ordinary Americans who commit crimes are prosecuted and imprisoned, that is Justice. When the same thing is done to Washington elites, that is Ugly Retribution.”

— Glenn Greenwald

37. “Finally, Snowden gave me an answer that felt vibrant and real. “The true measurement of a person’s worth isn’t what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs,” he said. “If you’re not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren’t real.”

— Glenn Greenwald

38. “There’s a huge cost to freedom in letting people talk about how you print these plastic guns or letting them say these things about arming for tyranny. There’s also a cost to letting the government say these ideas can’t be expressed, this is treason. It’s difficult.”

— Glenn Greenwald

39. “What we revealed is that this spying system is devoted not to terrorists, but is directed to innocent people around the world. None of this has anything to do with terrorism. Is Angela Merkel a terrorist?”

— Glenn Greenwald

40. “Your personal life is now known as Facebook’s data. Its CEO’s personal life is now known as mind your own business.”

— Glenn Greenwald

41. “The bottom layer of the right-wing noise machine.”

— Glenn Greenwald

42. “What state surveillance actually is is best understood by the NSA’s own documents and own words, which I think as you know I happen to have a lot of.”

— Glenn Greenwald

43. “The War on Terror has been and continues to be, above all, a war on the most basic liberties and political safeguards that we’re all taught are what distinguishes the US and keeps it free.”

— Glenn Greenwald

44. “Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations.”

— Glenn Greenwald

45. “It’s almost hard to imagine anything more undemocratic than the view that political officials should not debate American wars in public, but only express concerns ‘privately with the administration.’ That’s just a small sliver of Johnson’s radicalism: replacing Feingold in the Senate with Ron Johnson would be a civil liberties travesty analogous to the economic travesty from, say, replacing Bernie Sanders with Lloyd Blankfein.”

— Glenn Greenwald

46. “For those suggesting criticisms of drone kills should wait until the election: that’d be reasonable if he stops killing until the election.”

— Glenn Greenwald

47. “When you cheer for the erosion of Dzhokhar Tsarnaevs rights, you’re cheering for the erosion of your own.”

— Glenn Greenwald

48. “Objectivity” means nothing more than reflecting the biases and serving the interests of entrenched Washington. Opinions are problematic only when they deviate from the acceptable range of Washington orthodoxy.”

— Glenn Greenwald

49. “Whether a country is actually free is determined not by how well-rewarded its convention-affirming media elites are and how ignored its passive citizens are but by how it treats its dissidents, those posing authentic challenges to what the government does.”

— Glenn Greenwald

50. “What I do know is that Charlie Hebdo cartoonists have been converted into the closest thing the West has to religious-like martyrs in the war against radical Islam, which means that anything short of pure reverence for them generates tribal rage and vilification.”

— Glenn Greenwald