Edward Snowden Quotes

You would be surprised how effective, at least for influencing low-information voters, negative propaganda about me is.

They are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them.

I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end.

It is interesting that so many people who become disenchanted, who protest against their own organizations, are people who contributed something to them and then saw how it was misused.

You have to remember the way the internet works, when you communicate with the server, it's very likely not in your country. It's somewhere else in the world.

Getting inequality out there into the consciousness was important. All these political pundits now talking about the 2014 and 2016 elections are talking about inequality.

I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me.

A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's promises.

I told the government I'd volunteer for prison, as long as it served the right purpose.

If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.

And that's not something I'm willing to support, it's not something I'm willing to build and it's not something I'm willing to live under.

I don't want the stage. I'm terrified of giving these talking heads some distraction, some excuse to jeopardize, smear, and delegitimize a very important movement.

We have to be able to reject disproportionate and unjustified responses in the cyber domain just as we do in the physical domain.

I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.

The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.

I do not expect to see home again.

Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you are being watched and recorded.

The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.

The only thing I fear is the harmful effects on my family, who I won't be able to help any more. That's what keeps me up at night.

There are more important things than money. If I were motivated by money, I could have sold these documents to any number of countries and gotten very rich.

Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.

We need to put the security back in the National Security Agency. We can't have the national surveillance agency.

The question for us is not what new story will come out next. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

I'm still alive, and I don't lose sleep because I have done what I feel I needed to do, it was the right thing to do and I am not going to be afraid.

I don't want to hide. If I get arrested, I get arrested.

We do not live in a revolutionary time. People are not prepared to contest power.

I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things.

All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed. That is a milestone we left a long time ago.

I hope you have read the election programme of the Labour Party...this is not socialism. It is Bolshevism run mad.

I would argue that security and liberty, security and privacy are not actually opposing. The only place those can be oppositional is in the realm of rhetoric but not fact.

Being confronted with the realization that work you intended to benefit people is being used against them has a radicalizing effect.

The only way I could be extradited is through the principle of what my lawyers call "politics trumps law."

[Our system of education ]not designed to create critical thinkers.

As I said before, [patriotism] is distinct from acting to benefit the government - a distinction that's increasingly lost today.

In liberal societies we don't typically require citizens to rearrange their activities, their lives, the way they go about their business, to make it easy for the police to do their work.

We have to be able to ask questions in order to answer them.

I don't spend all day running hand-on-hat from shadowy figures - I'm in exile.

I've been a spy for almost all of my adult life - I don't like being in the spotlight.

I have been a systems engineer, systems administrator, a senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer.

When it comes to social policies, I believe women have the right to make their own choices, and inequality is a really important issue.

I don't think political reform is likely to succeed. [Senators Tom] Udall and [Ron] Wyden, on the intelligence committee, have been sounding the alarm, but they are a minority.

I don't go out and play football and stuff - that's not me. I want to think, I want to build, I want to talk, I want to create.

It doesn't need to be consistently concentrated in these venture-capital funds and things like that.

The [Barack] Obama administration almost appears as though it is afraid of the intelligence community. They're afraid of death by a thousand cuts - you know, leaks and things like that.

US spend more on research and development than the other countries, so we shouldn't be making the internet a more hostile, a more aggressive territory.

All I was was a mechanism.

In America, we collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.

The work of a generation is beginning here, with your hearings, and you have the full measure of my gratitude and support.

Going all the way back to Daniel Ellsberg, it is clear that the government is not concerned with damage to national security, because in none of these cases was there damage.

Do we want to emulate China in the way that China emulates the West? I think, for most Americans, the answer to that question would be no.