Government Spying Quotes

I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong. ~ Edward Snowden

The great fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. [People] won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things And in the months ahead, the years ahead, it's only going to get worse. [The NSA will] say that because of the crisis, the dangers that we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny. ~ Edward Snowden

They are intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them. ~ Edward Snowden

I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents. ~ Edward Snowden

We have got a CIA station just up the road - the consulate here in Hong Kong - and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be. ~ Edward Snowden

I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant. ~ Edward Snowden

I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions. ~ Edward Snowden

The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. ~ Edward Snowden

I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under. ~ Edward Snowden

The only thing I fear is the harmful effects on my family, who I won't be able to help any more. That's what keeps me up at night. ~ Edward Snowden

The government spying on people doesn't literally make programmers write worse code. It just leads eventually to a world in which bad ideas will win. And because this is so important to hackers, they're especially sensitive to it. They can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm. ~ Paul Graham

Piketty would impose a progressive annual tax on capital. By a static analysis, such a tax might reduce the yield of capital to the rate of GDP expansion and thus eliminate the bias toward top-heavy accumulation by elites. Upholding the secular stagnation theory of permanent growth slowdown, he naturally focuses on depressing the return to capital. Taking money from the rich and giving it to government might seem to address "inequality." But by putting capital into the hands of the least productive users of it - politicians - he would aggravate the very stagnation he warns against. ~ George Gilder

A government must not waiver once it has chosen it's course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward. ~ Otto Von Bismarck

We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma. ~ Chuck Grassley

Money power means budget power and it is folly to imagine that the citizen can control government unless he can control its budget. ~ E.C. Riegel

Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed. ~ Giambattista Vico

Give me a country where it is the most natural thing in the world for a government that does not understand you to let you alone. ~ Henry David Thoreau

We also received food stamps and bus tokens. Even though she was not a welfare mom, my mother still very much appreciated the government assistance we did receive from time to time. Still, I had an inherent dislike for government assistance and was frankly quite embarrassed that we had to accept anything from them. ~ Ben Carson

Every writer's difficult journey is a movement from silence to speech. We must be intensely private and interior in order to find a voice and a vision - and we must bring our work to an outside world where the market, or public outrage, or even government censorship can destroy our voice. ~ Sara Paretsky

We should - we will - welcome people of faith into the political process ... It is essential that believers enter the arena. Your involvement in politics helps determine how well our democracy works. We have finally learned that government programs cannot solve our problems. Government can hand out money, but government cannot put hope in our hearts or a sense of purpose in our lives. ~ George W. Bush

Government is the enemy until you need a friend. ~ William Cohen

It is federal, because it is the government of States united in a political union, in contradistinction to a government of individuals, that is, by what is usually called, a social compact. To express it more concisely, it is federal and not national because it is the government of a community of States, and not the government of a single State or Nation. ~ John C. Calhoun

members of labor unions, and un-organized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers - themselves desparately afraid of being downsized - are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for - someone willing to assure them that once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and post modernist professors will no longer be calling the shots...
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion... All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet pp89-90 ~ Richard M. Rorty

Archaeologists gave the military the idea to use aerial photographs for spying and field survey. We are fortunate that the spatial and spectral resolutions of the imagery available to us are so broadly useful for archaeology. ~ Sarah Parcak

Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency. ~ Adam Smith

There are 10,000 local governments in the state of New York. Ten thousand! Town, village, lighting district, water district, sewer district, a special district to count the other districts in case you missed a district. ~ Andrew Cuomo

A laconic Texas lawmaker declined to use his considerable influence to intervene in a loud dispute between his colleagues. When asked why not, he said, They're not voting. If they're not voting, they're not passing any laws. If they're not passing any laws, they're not hurting anybody. ~ Robert A. Caro

Today, grass-roots Republicans want to drink a bottle of 2010 small-government wine, but our candidates were bottled in another era, before the tea party's ideas took root. ~ Ari Fleischer

It would be quite wrong to hold the Soviet government responsible for the activities of American Communists. ~ J. Stalin

Most everything government does is worse than useless. ~ James Cook

Others, craven-hearted, said disparagingly, that "he threw his life away," because he resisted the government. Which way have they thrown their lives, pray? - Such ~ Henry David Thoreau

The Chinese government tried to keep a lid on the SARS crisis, but there were 160 million text messages in three days sent by Chinese citizens. These are early indications that it's going to be difficult for people who used to have control over the news to maintain that level of control. ~ Howard Rheingold

The whole financial structure of Wall Street seems to rise or fall on the mere fact that the Federal Reserve Bank raises or lowers the amount of interest. Any business that can't survive a one percent change must be skating on thin ice.
Why even the poor farmer took a raise of another ten percent just to get a loan from the bank, and nobody from the government paid any attention. But you let Wall Street have a nightmare and the whole country has to help to get them back into bed again. ~ Will Rogers

We need the mass movements, we need people to get together and march, or even just stand in one place, not only for those in power to see what the people want, but for people who are decidedly not empowered to see you out there, and to shift, just a little bit, the pebbles of thought in their minds. The protest is not only to show the government that you disagree, but to show your fellow citizens- even the smallest ones- that official policies can and should be disagreed with. To provoke a change. To disrupt easy assumptions. You show yourself. You toss in your chips. You walk. ~ Lauren Elkin

It's hard for me to believe that World Trade Center building 7 came down by itself twenty years from now, people will look at 911 the way we look at the assassination of JFK today. It couldn't possibly have been done the way the government told us. ~ Andrew Napolitano

We want to reduce the size of government in half as a percentage of GNP over the next 25 years. We want to reduce the number of people depending on government so there is more autonomy and more free citizens. ~ Grover Norquist

We certainly see opportunities in Vietnam for talented people to have jobs in the IT sector, including the improvement of the efficiency of the economy and the government. ~ Bill Gates

I don't think 'my way or the highway' works, that mentality. And that's what the Tea Party has done: drawn a line in the sand. I'm sorry - that doesn't work in business, that doesn't work in your family, it certainly doesn't work in government and our Congress. ~ Patrick Murphy

We are a government of laws. Any laws some government hack can find to louse up a man who's down. ~ Murray Kempton

That people even in well paid jobs choose ever earlier retirement is a severe indictment of our organizations
not just business , but government service, the universities. These people don't find their jobs interesting. ~ Peter Drucker

Those who hold power and influence in government either have limited interest in implementation or, in particular in the case of the prime minister and his most senior advisors, cannot find time in their busy agenda to think about implementation. They all too often assume that the machinery of government will do as it is told. ~ Donald J. Savoie

In a political sense, there is one problem that currently underlies all of the others. That problem is making Government sufficiently responsive to the people. If we don't make government responsive to the people, we don't make it believable. And we must make government believable if we are to have a functioning democracy. ~ Gerald R. Ford

It is time for corporate America to become 'the third pillar' of social change in our society, complementing the first two pillars of government and philanthropy. We need the entire private sector to begin committing itself not just to making profits, but to fulfilling higher and larger purposes by contributing to building a better world. ~ Simon Mainwaring

Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government. ~ James Madison

For proper government, the tribe must have ways to choose men whose lives reflect the way a government should behave. From ~ Frank Herbert

My father once told me that American democracy is a people's democracy at heart, and that it therefore can be as great as the American people, or as fallible. It depends on all of us. But our system is more fragile than we know. To sustain it, we must always cherish the ideals on which it was founded, remain vigilant against the dark forces that threaten it, and actively engage in the process of making it work. ~ George Takei

You can't believe the government - on anything. And you especially can't believe them when they're talking about important stuff. ~ Gary Webb

Force plays a much larger part in the government of the world than it did before 1914, and what is especially alarming, force tends increasingly to fall into the hands of those who are enemies of civilization. ~ Bertrand Russell

President Ford was a devoted, decent man of impeccable integrity who put service to his country before his own self interest. He helped heal our nation during a time of crisis, provided steady leadership and restored people's faith in the presidency and in government. ~ Mark Udall