Diffie Quotes

#1. I think that the people who are trying to shut down WikiLeaks are going to have to accept this as a fact of reality that cryptography allows you to do this kind of thing.

Whitfield Diffie

#2. She thinks that he looks like Elvis, when he runs his fingers through that jet black hair.

Joe Diffie

#3. In a sense, communications networks can be defined entirely by who has cryptographic keys, and I think a lot of networks will work that way in the future.

Whitfield Diffie

#4. Intellectual work is essentially a lonely process, and if you can find a way of doing something so that you're in company without being disturbed, that, for me, is the critical thing. I often get to feel isolated so often if I'm sitting either where there aren't people or isn't a view.

Whitfield Diffie

#5. I think, and I've thought this for a long time, that we live, roughly speaking, in the last generation of human beings.

Whitfield Diffie

#6. It isn't that secrets are never needed in security. It's that they are never desirable.

Whitfield Diffie

#7. We have experienced an utter explosion in investigative techniques. Walk the streets, look at the cameras! They are now recognising people automatically from photos; we have DNA fingerprinting, infrascan photos that can identify you from the veins in your face.

Whitfield Diffie

#8. The decisions we make about communication security today will determine the kind of society we live in tomorrow.

Whitfield Diffie

#9. Sometimes in public you don't feel like being "on." But it's OK. It beats working anyday.

Joe Diffie

#10. If you say to people that they, as a matter of fact, can't protect their conversations, in particular their political conversations, I think you take a long step toward making a transition from a free society to a totalitarian society.

Whitfield Diffie

#11. One of the things that characterizes good intellectual work is a certain self-importance.

Whitfield Diffie

#12. I really believe in the radical viewpoint. And I have always believed that one's politics and the character of his particular work are inseparable.

Whitfield Diffie

#13. Some people make sharp distinctions sort of between their recreational musings and their professional work. I don't make that distinction very much.

Whitfield Diffie

#14. I am not convinced that lack of encryption is the primary problem. The problem with the Internet is that it is meant for communications among non-friends.

Whitfield Diffie

#15. Without strong encryption, you will be spied on systematically by lots of people.

Whitfield Diffie

#16. If you have ambition, you might not achieve anything, but without ambition, you are almost certain not to achieve anything.

Whitfield Diffie

#17. I have always believed the thesis that one's politics and the character of one's intellectual work are inseparable.

Whitfield Diffie

#18. I understood the importance in principle of public key cryptography but it's all moved much faster than I expected. I did not expect it to be a mainstay of advanced communications technology.

Whitfield Diffie

#19. I thought cryptography was a technique that did not require your trusting other people-that if you encrypted your files, you would have the control to make the choice as to whether you would surrender your files.

Whitfield Diffie

#20. I can walk the line, if it ain't too straight.

Joe Diffie

#21. People are leaving trails everywhere they go; automated web crawlers tell you an awful lot about their social activities. The flow of information in fundamentally unobtrusive ways into social control organisations has risen dramatically.

Whitfield Diffie

#22. Fix me up with a mannequin, just remember I like blondes. I'll be the life of the party, even when I'm dead and gone.

Joe Diffie

#23. I have been working on two problems for three years: one of them for 8 or 9 years, and one of them for 3, 4, 5 years.

Whitfield Diffie

#24. Two people can work on a problem better than one.

Whitfield Diffie

#25. I liked Berkeley tremendously, Berkeley was a very leftist campus. I came to love that city as much as I love Paris or the south of France or New York.

Whitfield Diffie

#26. If you are designing cryptosystems, you've got to think about long-term applications. You've got to try to figure out how to build something that is secure against technology in the next century that you cannot even imagine.

Whitfield Diffie

#27. Cloud computing is a challenge to security, but one that can be overcome.

Whitfield Diffie

#28. I certainly enjoy going on stage and lecturing and talking to Congress. That's a personality explanation. And given government proposals, I thought I had a clear view that they were antagonistic to human freedom.

Whitfield Diffie

#29. Lots of people working in cryptography have no deep concern with real application issues. They are trying to discover things clever enough to write papers about.

Whitfield Diffie

#30. I thought of computers as very low class. I thought of myself as a pure mathematician and was interested in partial differential equations and topology and things like that.

Whitfield Diffie

#31. People meet in bars after work all over the world and talk about the great problems of life and death and the world and politics and they don't take themselves seriously. They can do nothing else except chat about these things in bars after work.

Whitfield Diffie

#32. They got love bigger than the Beatles, wild and free like the Rolling Stones.

Joe Diffie

#33. The most important impact of technology on communications security is that it draws better and better traffic into vulnerable channels.

Whitfield Diffie

#34. I was, from early on, interested in science. And my parents were very obliging about that. My father used to take me to the museum of natural history, and I knew much more scientific stuff early on. From the time I was 11 or 12, I wanted to be a mathematician.

Whitfield Diffie

#35. I guess, in a very real sense, I'm a Gnostic. I had been looking all my life for some great mystery ... I think somewhere deep in my mind is the notion that if I could learn just the right thing, I would be saved.

Whitfield Diffie

#36. We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions.

Whitfield Diffie