Top 100 Glenn Greenwald Quotes
#1. [H]aving the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.
Glenn Greenwald
#2. The primary theory embraced by the Bush administration to justify its War on Terror policies was that the 'battlefield' is no longer confined to identifiable geographical areas, but instead, the entire globe is now one big, unlimited 'battlefield.'
Glenn Greenwald
#3. The idea that we should dismantle the core protections of our political system to erect a ubiquitous surveillance state for the sake of this risk is the height of irrationality. Yet exaggeration of the threat is repeated over and over.
Glenn Greenwald
#4. I think Dianne Feinstein may be the most Orwellian political official in Washington.
Glenn Greenwald
#5. In video games, one of the most helpless against injustice can even mighty.
Glenn Greenwald
#6. The Obama administration does not hate unauthorized leaks of classified information. They are more responsible for such leaks than anyone. What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing. Those are the only kinds of leaks that are prosecuted.
Glenn Greenwald
#7. I've always thought stability was suffocating and deadly. Like, when I read that the kids I went to law school with have stayed at the same firm, I feel like I'm reading an obituary. How much money do you need? Six million, seven million? Put that in the bank and do something else. Get out!
Glenn Greenwald
#8. You can offer the ability to citizens to choose from one of the two parties and elect their leaders as much as you want. But "democracy" is an illusion - a sham - if the most significant acts taken by those leaders are kept concealed from the citizenry.
Glenn Greenwald
#9. Rich, famous, insider journalists do not want to subvert the status quo that so lavishly rewards them. Like all courtiers, they are eager to defend the system that vests them with their privileges and contemptuous of anyone who challenges that system.
Glenn Greenwald
#10. But the true measure of a society's freedom is how it treats its dissidents and other marginalized groups, not how it treats good loyalists.
Glenn Greenwald
#11. Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chat and social media messages and emails, what you're really talking about is the full extent of human communication.
Glenn Greenwald
#12. There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States, but around the world.
Glenn Greenwald
#13. It is always unconscionable for the government to punish people for expressing an idea merely because government officials - or the majority of citizens - decide that those ideas are 'dangerous' or 'wrong.' That is a power nobody ought to possess.
Glenn Greenwald
#14. The purpose of whistleblowing is to expose secret and wrongful acts by those in power in order to enable reform.
Glenn Greenwald
#15. being debated by the UN that involved imposing new sanctions on Iran. A similar surveillance document from August 2010 reveals that the United States spied on eight members of
Glenn Greenwald
#16. adviser, repeatedly requested that the NSA spy on the internal discussions of key member states to learn their negotiation strategies. A May 2010 SSO report
Glenn Greenwald
#17. I'd like to vote for the candidate similar to the one the Right absurdly claims Obama is.
Glenn Greenwald
#18. The definition of an extreme authoritarian is one who is willing blindly to assume that government accusations are true without any evidence presented or opportunity to contest those accusations.
Glenn Greenwald
#19. The same president who has insisted that core moralism drives him has brought America to its lowest moral standing in history.
Glenn Greenwald
#22. Terrorism': the word that means nothing, yet justifies everything.
Glenn Greenwald
#23. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe.
Glenn Greenwald
#24. What made Guantanamo such a travesty - and what still makes it such - is that it is a system of indefinite detention whereby human beings are put in cages for years and years without ever being charged with a crime.
Glenn Greenwald
#25. Time magazine's Jay Carney and Richard Stengel are now in government while Obama aides David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs are commentators on MSNBC.
Glenn Greenwald
#26. It's common to go from 'crashing the gate' to guarding it.
Glenn Greenwald
#27. Somehow, when the authoritarians on the Right search for icons of manly warrior power to venerate, they find only those who like to melodramatically play-act as such, but who ran away when it came time to actually perform.
Glenn Greenwald
#28. It's really encouraging and inspiring to be around a gathering of so many people ... who really are committed to that vision. (While addressing the American Socialist Party, 2011)
Glenn Greenwald
#29. When you cheer for the erosion of Dzhokhar Tsarnaevs rights, you're cheering for the erosion of your own.
Glenn Greenwald
#30. Mueller and Stewart estimate that expenditures on domestic homeland security (i.e., not counting the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan) have increased by more than $1 trillion since 9/11,
Glenn Greenwald
#31. We should not be comfortable or content in a society where the only way to remain free of surveillance and repression is if we make ourselves as unthreatning, passive, and compliant as possible.
Glenn Greenwald
#32. For those suggesting criticisms of drone kills should wait until the election: that'd be reasonable if he stops killing until the election.
Glenn Greenwald
#33. The point of asylum is not to declare to the world what country you think is the pinnacle of civilization. The point of asylum is to find a country that's both willing and able to protect you from political persecution. In no way is asylum an endorsement of a country's politics, laws, or values.
Glenn Greenwald
#34. When journalists are 'accused' of being 'advocates', that means: challenging and deviating from DC orthodoxies.
Glenn Greenwald
#35. I know it's a really hard concept to process, but the fact that Govt accuses someone of being a Terrorist doesn't mean they are.
Glenn Greenwald
#36. Why is one view permissible and the other criminally barred-other than because the force of law is being used to control political discourse and one form of terrorism (violence in the Muslim world) is done by, rather than to, the west?
Glenn Greenwald
#37. The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice.
Glenn Greenwald
#38. Objectivity means nothing more than reflecting the biases and serving the interests of entrenched Washington. Opinions are problematic only when they deviate from the acceptable range of Washington orthodoxy.
Glenn Greenwald
#39. Washington likes to threaten the people over whom they exercise power.
Glenn Greenwald
#40. I knew from my years of writing about NSA abuses that it can be hard to generate serious concern about secret state surveillance: invasion of privacy and abuse of power can be viewed as abstractions, ones that are difficult to get people to care about viscerally.
Glenn Greenwald
#41. NSA has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet.
Glenn Greenwald
#42. The single most remarkable (and revealing) fact of the Obama presidency may very well be the lack of a single prosecution of Wall Street executives for the massive fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.
Glenn Greenwald
#43. The fact that war is the word we use for almost everything - on terrorism, drugs, even poverty - has certainly helped to desensitize us to its invocation; if we wage wars on everything, how bad can they be?
Glenn Greenwald
#44. When someone who wields political power does something you dislike or disagree with, it's incumbent upon you to object, criticize, and demand a different course. Those who refuse to do so are abdicating the most basic duty of citizenship and rendering themselves impotent.
Glenn Greenwald
#45. The many pro-surveillance advocates I have debated since Snowden blew the whistle have been quick to echo Eric Schmidt's view that privacy is for people who have something to hide. But none of them would willingly give me the passwords to their email accounts, or allow video cameras in their homes.
Glenn Greenwald
#46. What I do know is that Charlie Hebdo cartoonists have been converted into the closest thing the West has to religious-like martyrs in the war against radical Islam, which means that anything short of pure reverence for them generates tribal rage and vilification.
Glenn Greenwald
#47. Virtually every one of the most far-right neocon Bush officials - including Dick Cheney himself - has spent years now praising Obama for continuing their terrorism policies which Obama the Senator and Presidential Candidate once so harshly denounced.
Glenn Greenwald
#48. A lot of these people are Iraqis fighting for control of their own government. Maybe there's an argument to make that outside forces that go in and start bombing that country or invading that country are actually terrorists more so than the people in the country.
Glenn Greenwald
#49. 'Terrorism' itself is not an objective term or legitimate object of study, but was conceived of as a highly politicized instrument and has been used that way ever since.
Glenn Greenwald
#50. We shouldn't have to be faithful loyalists of the powerful to feel safe from state surveillance. Nor should the price of immunity be refraining from controversial or provocative dissent.
Glenn Greenwald
#51. Was a full-throated harangue, a typical performance when American officials speak about a regime not aligned with the United States.
Glenn Greenwald
#52. American political culture quickly and always outpaces any attempt to satirize it.
Glenn Greenwald
#53. Government and businesses cannot function without enormous amounts of data, and many people have to have access to that data.
Glenn Greenwald
#54. He's the President - it's the responsibility of every citizen to criticize aggressively when they think it's warranted.
Glenn Greenwald
#55. There's a huge cost to freedom in letting people talk about how you print these plastic guns or letting them say these things about arming for tyranny. There's also a cost to letting the government say these ideas can't be expressed, this is treason. It's difficult.
Glenn Greenwald
#56. They're called 'facts', and my role is to amplify those, not cheerlead. And I don't care at all what you think of my motives.
Glenn Greenwald
#57. Edward Snowden made an audacious claim: I, sitting at my desk, could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.
Glenn Greenwald
#58. Contrary to repeated claims from President Obama and the NSA, it is already clear that a substantial number of the agency's activities have nothing to do with antiterrorism efforts or even with national security.
Glenn Greenwald
#59. Beyond all the other reasons not to do it, free speech assaults always backfire: they transform bigots into martyrs.
Glenn Greenwald
#60. An elite class that is free to operate without limits - whether limits imposed by the rule of law or fear of the responses from those harmed by their behavior - is an elite class that will plunder, degrade, and cheat at will, and act endlessly to fortify its own power.
Glenn Greenwald
#61. Your personal life is now known as Facebook's data. Its CEO's personal life is now known as mind your own business.
Glenn Greenwald
#62. Promoting the human capacity to reason and make decisions: that is the purpose of whistle-blowing, of activism, of political journalism.
Glenn Greenwald
#63. Encryption matters, and it is not just for spies and philanderers.
Glenn Greenwald
#65. As for the claim that drone 'pilots' are not engaged in the extinguishing of human life via video games, the military's own term for its drone kills - 'bug splat,' which happens to be the name of a children's video game - and other evidence negates that.
Glenn Greenwald
#66. For many kids, the Internet is a means of self-actualization. It allows them to explore who they are and who they want to be, but that works only if we're able to be private and anonymous, to make mistakes without them following us.
Glenn Greenwald
#67. The more fear confrontational activism can put into the heart of the political class, the better.
Glenn Greenwald
#68. The hallmark of an authoritarian idiot is yelling TERRORIST-LOVER! at anyone questioning the definition of Terrorist.
Glenn Greenwald
#69. A key purpose of journalism is to provide an adversarial check on those who wield the greatest power by shining a light on what they do in the dark, and informing the public about those acts.
Glenn Greenwald
#70. Only In America can a renowned and devoted terrorism supporter like Peter King be the arbiter of national security and treason.
Glenn Greenwald
#71. It's always easy to get people to condemn threats to free speech when the speech being threatened is speech that they like. It's much more difficult to induce support for free speech rights when the speech being punished is speech they find repellent.
Glenn Greenwald
#72. I have nothing but the highest regard for 'Salon' and its commitment to independent and provocative journalism.
Glenn Greenwald
#73. The job of the press is to disprove the falsehoods that power invariably disseminates to protect itself.
Glenn Greenwald
#74. Whether a country is actually free is determined not by how well-rewarded its convention-affirming media elites are and how ignored its passive citizens are but by how it treats its dissidents, those posing authentic challenges to what the government does.
Glenn Greenwald
#75. It's hardly news that the Obama administration is intensely and, in many respects, unprecedentedly hostile toward the news-gathering process.
Glenn Greenwald
#76. You can't cheer when political officials punish the expression of views you dislike and then expect to be taken seriously when you wrap yourself in the banner of free speech in order to protest state punishment of views you like and share.
Glenn Greenwald
#77. You can't have a pristine house with ten dogs, and I'd rather have the ten dogs.
Glenn Greenwald
#78. To permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination.
Glenn Greenwald
#79. Nobody really even knows with whom the US is at war, or where. Everyone just knows that it is vital that it continue in unlimited form indefinitely.
Glenn Greenwald
#80. I only have one fear in doing all of this," he said, which is "that people will see these documents and shrug, that they'll say, 'we assumed this was happening and don't care.' The only thing I'm worried about is that I'll do all this to my life for nothing.
Glenn Greenwald
#81. Radical expansions of power are often introduced in this way, by persuading people that they affect just a specific, discrete group.
Glenn Greenwald
#82. The Obama administration says we only destroy the privacy of non-Americans. That is not true. The government is spying on Americans.
Glenn Greenwald
#83. When I was talking to strangers over the Internet in the 1990s, there would be a much more intense connection because they're disembodied, so it's just your brain and your soul interacting with this other person, and it just frees you up in this incredibly empowering way.
Glenn Greenwald
#84. The American Right has an amazing ability to lionize leaders whose lives are the precise antithesis of the political values that define their image.
Glenn Greenwald
#85. It's so much easier to debate people when you can pretend that they hold moronic position that they don't actually believe.
Glenn Greenwald
#86. If establishment journalists were to replicate actual stenography, it would be an improvement on most of the work they produce.
Glenn Greenwald
#87. Technology has now enabled a type of ubiquitous surveillance that had previously been the province of only the most imaginative science fiction writers.
Glenn Greenwald
#88. The free press guarantee does not only protect corporate reporters but anyone engaged in journalism, whether employed or not.
Glenn Greenwald
#89. I realized," he said, "that they were building a system whose goal was the elimination of all privacy, globally. To make it so that no one could communicate electronically without the NSA being able to collect, store, and analyze the communication.
Glenn Greenwald
#90. The first was about the secret order from the FISA court compelling Verizon, one of America's largest telephone companies, to turn over to the NSA all the telephone records of all Americans.
Glenn Greenwald
#91. A common criticism of establishment journalists entails comparing them to stenographers, on the ground that most of them do little more than mindlessly write down and uncritically repeat what government officials say.
Glenn Greenwald
#92. The American national security state is totally bipartisan. My biggest problem is with the Democrats, like Feinstein and Pelosi, who are defending it because there is a Democrat in the White House, and they are party loyalists and hacks before they are public servants.
Glenn Greenwald
#94. It isn't those of us who oppose American aggression in the Muslim world who need manipulative, exploitative reminders about 9/11; it's those who cheer for these policies who are making a follow-up attack ever more likely.
Glenn Greenwald
#95. What state surveillance actually is is best understood by the NSA's own documents and own words, which I think as you know I happen to have a lot of.
Glenn Greenwald
#96. The United States government in Washington constantly gives amnesty to its highest officials, even when they commit the most egregious crimes. And yet the idea of amnesty for a whistleblower is considered radical and extreme.
Glenn Greenwald
#97. both observing and breaking the rules involve moral choices, and both courses of action reveal something important about the individual involved. Contrary
Glenn Greenwald
#98. Whatever one thinks of the justifiability of drone attacks, it's one of the least 'brave' or courageous modes of warfare ever invented. It's one thing to call it just, but to pretend it's 'brave' is Orwellian in the extreme.
Glenn Greenwald
#99. A number I'd love to know: the % of those now saying 'we have to vote Obama to stop an attack on Iran' who will support one if Obama does it.
Glenn Greenwald
#100. In essence, I see the value of journalism as resting in a twofold mission: informing the public of accurate and vital information, and its unique ability to provide a truly adversarial check on those in power.
Glenn Greenwald
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