Top 45 Edward Snowden Quotes

I have been made stateless and hounded for my act of political expression.

The United States Government has placed me on no-fly lists.

I do not expect to see home again, though that is what I want.

I never chose to be in Russia, and I would prefer to be in my own country, but if I can’t make it home, I will continue to work very much in the same way that I have… What happens to me is not as important; I simply serve as the mechanism of disclosure.

No system of mass surveillance has existed in any society that we know of to this point that has not been abused.

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

I don’t want to harm my government. I want to help my government. But the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they’re willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society and say, ‘Hey, this is not appropriate.’

I have no regrets.

Who I am really doesn’t matter at all. If I’m the worst person in the world, you can hate me and move on. What really matters here are the issues. What really matters here is the kind of government we want, the kind of Internet we want, the kind of relationship between people and societies.

I don’t see myself as a hero because what I’m doing is self-interested: I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.

I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions.

Sometimes the scandal is not what law was broken, but what the law allows.

When you are in positions of privileged access… you see things that may be disturbing. Over time, that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up.

I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.

America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.

What the government wants is something they never had before. They want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing?

That’s the beauty of the Internet is that we’re no longer tied to our communities by physical connections.

If I could go anywhere in the world, that place would be home.

I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.

When you are subverting the power of government, that’s a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.

Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn’t feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.

I have had no contact with the Chinese government. I only work with journalists.

You could watch entire villages and see what everyone was doing. I watched NSA tracking people’s Internet activities as they typed. I became aware of just how invasive U.S. surveillance capabilities had become. I realized the true breadth of this system. And almost nobody knew it was happening.

What does that mean for a society, for a democracy, when the people that you elect on the basis of promises can basically suborn the will of the electorate?

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.

Even though we may focus first on the rights of our own country, that does not mean that we should disregard the rights of everyone else.

I’m an engineer, not a politician.

The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.

Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it.

I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression.

I think the most important idea is to remember that there have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal.

If an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on – it’s all the same.

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

I think it’s important to remember that people don’t set their lives on fire. They don’t walk away from their extraordinarily, extraordinarily comfortable lives … for no reason.

My intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate.

I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong.

I do agree that when it comes to cyber warfare, we have more to lose than any other nation on earth.

The NSA has the greatest surveillance capabilities in American history… The real problem is that they’re using these capabilities to make us vulnerable.

I support a guaranteed basic income. I think we should take care of sick people. I believe women can make their own choices and that the government is at its best when it’s building bridges instead of bombs.

The NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America.

I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA. I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.

I can’t in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.

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

It’s important that we elevate and primarily focus on the rights of American citizens, but it’s also important that we don’t forget, 95 percent of the world’s population lives beyond our own borders.

When people say, ‘Why don’t you face the music?’ I say, ‘You have to understand the music is not an open court and a fair trial.’