Edward Snowden Quotes

Every person has only so much attention to give, and politics and government takes up only a fraction of what it did 25 years ago.

It is a lucky thing that newspaper reporters do not attend these meetings. If they did, they would see how little our activities are related to the real needs of society.

I am drawn to public service.

I always read the papers, the political bits.

Just in the course of an hour, people didn't need to be persuaded. They just needed to hear, oh my god, there is another plan here which is about the public interest.

As a society we can't live without moral considerations. We do have to protect the public good. And markets are not designed to do that, so we need a political process.

Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.

Hillary Clinton's been around for 30 years. Why do these stories need to be told? It isn't all of this widely known?

To the very limited extent that I have a political consciousness, to some extent I'm a lazy, apolitical sort of guy that just flits around.

Politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be "apolitical" is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined life.

A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service.

Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.

I'd rather frame [Clintons] in terms of what I think we need to do going forward.

The future lies with those wise political leaders who realize that the great public is interested more in government than in politics.

That seems to be a woman who is genuinely depressed that this is the political dialogue she [Hillary Clinton] is been thrown into in the 21st century in running for president of the United States.

People who consider themselves political, who follow political developments most rigorously, are often those who view the political process with the greatest lack of perspective.

When I was younger, I used to be very impatient with anyone who wasn't doing overtly political work. I've since come to feel that some writers have an appetite or a need for the political, for political discourse, for historical political subjects.

Political art never goes away. I started watching The West Wing show recently and I'm actually learning about how the government works in a way. It's kind of embarrassing.

We need to recognize that part our political problem is that we do not participate effectively, that we suffer from a kind of mental slumber.

Knowing more about the public effects his work will have, the engineer ought to consider himself an "officer of the court" and keep the general interest always in mind.

The question for me is not are we political, but how are we political? We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage.

Ever since I've had any political awareness, I've felt either alone or part of a tiny minority.

The only reason I do these interviews - I hate talking about myself, I hate doing this stuff - is because incredibly well-meaning people, whom I respect and trust, tell me that this will help bring about positive changes. It's not going to cause a sea change, but it will benefit the public.

The profession of journalism ought to be about telling people what they need to know - not what they want to know.

Politics becomes a part of your life once you realize it has been all along.