Edward Snowden Quotes

Overtly and covertly, legally and illegally, the military-industrial complex (in the United States) has joined forces with the prison-industrial complex, linked further to the omnipresent national security-police complex, all clasping hands tightly with the War on Drugs, in a declaration of War on the American people and the Bill of Rights. This Authority juggernaut - enamored with its own perpetuation, glorification and enrichment - has convinced the American public that without its storm troopers all hell would break loose and the safety and security of the citizenry would be on a life-support machine.

We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns

The most persistent threat to freedom, to the rights of Americans, is fear.

The combination of the growth of these digital technologies, the ability of the government to conjure up these secret interpretations, plus a very unusual and novel court make for this ever-expanding surveillance state. We so treasure our freedoms; we will regret it if our generation doesn't use this unique time to reform the surveillance laws and make it clear that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive. We can do both.

Long ago, there was a noble word, liberal, which derives from the word free. Now a strange thing happened to that word. A man named Hitler made it a term of abuse, a matter of suspicion, because those who were not with him were against him, and liberals had no use for Hitler. And then another man named McCarthy cast the same opprobrium on the word. ... We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us.

All of the civil rights problems during the past years have created a situation where America right now is moving toward a police state. You can't have anything otherwise. So that's your supposition.

It is setting a high value upon our opinions to roast men and women alive on account of them.

When you tolerate intolerance, you're not really being a liberal.

We see threats to liberal democracy coming from lots of directions. We have to create something new, a common response, because in so many places - the UK, France, Germany - ultranationalists and the far left threaten the free market and liberal democracy.

Whenever all men are...hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

Freedom without security portends chaos, perpetual anxiety and fear.

If we mean to support the liberty and independence which has cost us so much blood and treasure to establish, we must drive far away the demon of party spirit and local reproach.

I'm not worried that tomorrow there will be a battalion outside your Greenwich Village apartment. I'm worried about things like the McCain Liberman bill that would define enemy belligerents so loosely it would include Americans, which is just like Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini.

I will not let the patriot act, the most un-patriotic of acts, go unchallenged.

I'm left on a lot of things. If two gay guys want to get married, I could care less. If a nut case from overseas wants to blow up their wedding, that's when I'm right.

Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at ist own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority.

Demanding domestic security in times of war invites carelessness in preserving civil liberties and the right of privacy. Frequently the people are only too anxious for their freedoms to be sacrificed on the altar of authoritarianism thought to be necessary to remain safe and secure.

Carelessness about our security is dangerous, carelessness about our freedom is also dangerous.

It is crucial that civil liberties in this country be preserved, otherwise the terrorists will win the battle against American values without firing another shot.

It is foolish for people to think they can align themselves and be safe in a police state.

The way that you eliminate bad and ugly is either through activism and policy making that never tolerates evil -- instead of the liberal politically correct policy of accepting evil and accepting other points of views that destroy lives. We the thoughtful, productive people of American have got to take our freedom back.

The prospect of a government that treats all its citizens as criminal suspects is more terrifying than any terrorist. And even more frightening is a citizenry that can accept the surrender of its freedoms as the price of "freedom".

Hard to remember who is more dangerous: the people who are attacking our liberties overseas, or those who are suppressing them at home.

[In the event of war, Americans would] resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe they, at length, become willing to run the risk of being less free.

Champions of Liberty get called Fascists by Champions of Statism