Edward Snowden Quotes

Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

If you cloned JFK and Abraham Lincoln and made them president it wouldn't matter. Our system is just too corrupt and too broken. I think that science is corrupt and broken. I think health and nutrition. I think the economic systems, the international relations, the environment, everything, the engines of everything are broken.

Regarding social order, [Francis] Fukuyama writes, "The systematic study of how order, and thus social capital, can emerge in spontaneous and decentralized fashion is one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century." He correctly attributes the modern origins of this argument to F. A. Hayek, whose pioneering contributions to cognitive science, the study of cultural evolution, and the dynamics of social change put him in the forefront of the most creative scholars of the 20th century.

The white population could not possibly be unaffected by those events - some whites more stubborn in their defense of segregation, but others beginning to think in different ways. And the black population was transformed, having risen up in mass action for the first time, feeling its power, knowing now that if the old order could be shaken it could be toppled.

Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited.

The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal.

The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.

Beware of assumptions that seem "obvious" in one decade. They may become quaint in the next.

Anger is a little thing. Hate is a little thing. Order is a little thing. Each of these little things has a major impact on the big picture. Right thinking, right action, and right response to the little things will help us conquer the big things, like injustice, inequality, poverty, and disorder. Until we are each able to conquer and master the little things in our lives, the big things will remain undone.

I think it's very important for us to start to build a culture of resistance, because what we're doing isn't working, clearly.

Obviously I prefer freedom, but I know, and I think all history has told us, that freedom cannot flow from anarchy and disorder.

Well may we say 'God save the Queen', because nothing will save the Governor-General'.

The sudden and abrupt deletion of all individuals occupying the lower bands of the Tone Scale from the social order would result in an almost instant rise in the cultural tone and would interrupt the dwindling spiral into which any society may have entered.

On a personal level, Freaking Out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole.

The condemned social order has not been built up on paper and ink, and I don't fancy that a combination of paper and ink will ever put an end to it.

Whatever I had read as a child about the saints had thrilled me. I could see the nobility of giving one's life for the sick, the maimed, the leper. But there was another question in my mind. Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place? Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?

The clatter of a changing world is not pleasant, and those who have enjoyed the comforts and protection of the old order may be shocked and unhappy when they behold the vigorous young builders of a new world sweeping away their time-honored antiquities.

As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the "sacredness of human life." We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.

When we walk the streets at night in safety, it does not strike us that this might be otherwise. This habit of feeling safe has become second nature, and we do not reflect on just how this is due solely to the working of special institutions. Commonplace thinking often has the impression that force holds the state together, but in fact its only bond is the fundamental sense of order which everybody possesses.

Natural capitalism is not about making sudden changes, uprooting institutions, or fomenting upheaval for a new social order. Natural capitalism is about making small, critical choices that can tip economic and social factors in positive ways.

Modern science and technology can relieve men of the necessity for specialized, imbecile labor. They may, in principle, provide the basis for a rational social order based on free association and democratic control, if we have the will to create it.

...the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things... They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.

Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the shrine of the established social order and of the economic development into which I was born.

Oh, law and order! I often think it is that that is at the bottom of all the misery in the world.