Edward Snowden Quotes

There are some who apparently feel that the fight for freedom is separate from the Gospel. They express it in several ways, but it generally boils down to this: Just live the gospel; there's no need to get involved in trying to save freedom and the Constitution or stop communism.... Should we counsel the people, 'Just live your religion - there's no need to get involved in the fight for freedom?' No we should not, because our stand for freedom is a most basic part of our religion.

If individuality has no play, society does not advance; if individuality breaks out of all bounds, society perishes.

I try to operate on two unconnected levels. One on the practical level of action in which I am extremely cautious and conservative. The second is the realm of ideas where I try to be very free

Life can be so good if you let it. But you must trade with life. You give something and you get something, then you give something of yourself again and you receive something again. Life goes bad when people try to take from it without giving. Then they came away empty-handed, and they grab harder and more often, growing more disappointed and disillusioned each time.

I think again we're way out of balance. We've got to rein in what has become almost an article of faith that almost anybody can have a gun anywhere at any time. And I don't believe that is in the best interest of the vast majority of people.

Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

The balance when you're catching people up, and the craft of what we do as actors, is to try to make sure that the exposition sounds like thought and dialogue, and a plan or a problem or something that is motivationally induced, rather than just telling the audience information.

It's not a very sane thing to try to be great all the time. You want to make something magical; you want to make something wonderful; you want to give to everybody; you want to heal people; you want to still be inspired. That's not easy.

People are terrified to be set free - they hold on to their chains. They fight anyone who tries to break those chains. It's their security... How can they expect me or anyone else to set them free if they don't really want to be free?

The world is filled with people who are no longer needed -- and who try to make slaves of all of us -- and they have their music and we have ours.

It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.

The ’60s was the last time when large groups of people in the West searched for alternative modes of being. In a society like India’s, which is still not fully modern or totally organized, and has a great deal of tolerance for otherness in general, they find the cultural license to try other things, to be whatever they want to be.

Individual liberty and interdependence are both essential for life in society.

To me, trying to achieve the balance is when you become good: when you have enough technique to be able to play what is that you want, but also when you can refine what you want to communicate to people. As a younger person, it wasn't something I thought about so much.

Sometimes you're not like the person you'd want to hang out with. Would I really want to hang out with me full time? No, you've gotta find people who balance you out.

We need the tonic of wildness.

People try to contain things by putting them into categories. I don't.

Politics [is] the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.

We do need great change in Burma. We are trying to build a new society, a society where basic human rights are respected, and where our people enjoy all the benefits of democratic institutions.

How I loathe the servitude people try to hold up to me as being so valuable. I pity the man who is condemned to it, who cannot generally escape it, but it is not the burden of his labor that disposes me in his favor, it is - it can only be - the vigor of his protest against it.

Gymnastics, you get one shot; acting, it's like, do it again, do it again, do it again. So that was the one thing that I found very different. You're allowed to get different tries and you're more expressive in a way when you're working with people. In gymnastics, you're so on your own and individual.

I don't conjure up ways of denying people freedom. I don't sit around and examine what people do that I don't like and try to figure out ways to get them to stop it, unless we're talking about lawbreakers, of course. But I'm a freedom, liberty, live and let live kind of guy. I might not approve of or like what people do, but have at it.

The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. Try to make people moral, and you lay the groundwork for vice.

We may... affirm that the balance of power in a society accompanies the balance of property in land. The only possible way, then, of preserving the balance of power on the side of liberty and public virtue is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society; to make a division of the land into small quantities, so that the multitude may be possessed of landed estates.

Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.