Edward Snowden Quotes

Those whose conscience demands that they defy authority in some ways that involve great consequences must be willing to accept some penalty.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

Today, whether it is a student who holds a sit-in to get the army recruiters off his campus, or the mother of a dead soldier who refuses to leave the front gate of the president's ranch, we continue to be saved by brave people who risk ridicule and rejection but end up turning huge tides of public opinion in the direction of righteousness. We owe them enormous debts of gratitude. It is not easy to stand up for what is right, especially when everyone else is afraid to leave the comfortable path of conformity.

There have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal. Sometimes to do the right thing you have to break the law.

I don't care if I end up in jail or Guantánamo or whatever, kicked out of a plane with two gunshots in the face. I did what I did because I believe it is the right thing to do, and I will continue to do that.

I was made, by the law, a criminal, not because of what I had done, but because of what I stood for, because of what I thought, because of my conscience... If I had my time over I would do the same again. So would any man who dares call himself a man.

You are no Satyagrahi if you remain silent or passive spectators while your enemy is being done to death.

King consciously steered away from legal claims and instead relied on civil disobedience.

When your conscience says law is immoral, don't follow it.

If the law is a bad law, there is always the contingent right to take action that you would not otherwise take.

I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service.

How many of you are willing to go to jail for freedom?

Non-violence implies voluntary submission to the penalty for non-cooperation with evil.

These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest

I don't even really see sit-ins and marches as passive. I see them as quite assertive. I see those as emotionally aggressive tactics. I see people putting their lives on the line and being bold and brave.

Thoreau points out clearly that civil disobedience gets its moral authority by the willingness to suffer the penalties from disobeying a law, even if you think that law is unjust.

Civil disobedience has almost always been about expression. Generally, it's nonviolent, as defined by Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and King.

I remember back in the 1960s - late '50s, really - reading a comic book called 'Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Story.' Fourteen pages. It sold for 10 cents. And this little book inspired me to attend non-violence workshops, to study about Gandhi, about Thoreau, to study Martin Luther King, Jr., to study civil disobedience.

If Snowden really claims that his actions amounted to genuine civil disobedience, he should go to some English language bookstore in Moscow and get a copy of Henry David Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience'.

Rosa Parks inspired me to find a way to get in the way, to get in trouble... good trouble, necessary trouble.

If an injustice requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the government machine.

Change comes when people are willing to commit acts of peaceful civil disobedience.

When I think about protest, I worry so much that people think about it only as standing in the streets. And I say that as someone who has been standing in the streets of cities across the country - but at the root of it is this idea of telling the truth in public.

My father joined the NAACP when he was 12, in the '50s. He was part of the organizing efforts that led to some of the first sit-ins in North Carolina.

The protest that we go to or the time that we stand up for someone or do the right thing - despite its difficulty... We might not see the return of it, but who knows whose lives we can change by doing those things.