Top 100 Greenwald Quotes
#1. Why wouldn't we consider doing to Islamic extremists what Glenn Greenwald does routinely to Republicans?
Stewart Baker
#2. Now I would almost arrest Glenn Greenwald, who's the journalist who seems to want to help him get to Ecuador.
Glenn Greenwald
#3. Accusations fit on Greenwald really sounds like he's against all surveillance unless you can find a guy with the Al Qaeda card, wearing an Al Qaeda baseball cap, an Al Qaeda uniform.
Alan Dershowitz
#4. To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?
Glenn Greenwald
#5. A lot of progressives really believe that if we can turn out one more white paper with bullet points about how to fix Problem X, we can fix it. But that's not primarily the way you reach people or move them. You reach the heart first.
Robert Greenwald
#6. [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
#7. All the above is, of course, a gross simplification. There are deeper reasons to travel - itches and tickles on the underbelly of the unconscious mind. We go where we need to go, and then try to figure out what we're doing there.
Jeff Greenwald
#8. 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
#9. Whistleblowers are typically rendered incommunicado, either because they're in hiding, or advised by their lawyers to stay silent, or imprisoned. As a result, the public hears only about them, but never from them, which makes their demonization virtually inevitable.
Glenn Greenwald
#10. One of my book-reading friends used the term "our story unfolds" when describing a paper he was writing. He became somewhat less of a friend right at that moment.
Tommy Greenwald
#11. 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
#12. I think Dianne Feinstein may be the most Orwellian political official in Washington.
Glenn Greenwald
#13. Over and over again-in the movie, I have nine different people who have worked for Fox News network who have come forward and talked on camera, three of them anonymously, by the way.
Robert Greenwald
#14. It shouldn't take extreme courage and a willingness to go to prison for decades or even life to blow the whistle on bad government acts done in secret. But it does. And that is an immense problem for democracy, one that all journalists should be united in fighting.
Glenn Greenwald
#15. It's just simply the fact that the NSA does not think anybody should be able to communicate anywhere on the Earth without them being able to invade it.
Glenn Greenwald
#16. In video games, one of the most helpless against injustice can even mighty.
Glenn Greenwald
#17. There is thus little or no ability for an internet user to know when they are being covertly propagandized by their government, which is precisely what makes it so appealing to intelligence agencies, so powerful, and so dangerous.
Glenn Greenwald
#18. Certain documents, such as the FISA court order allowing collection of telephone records and Obama's presidential directive to prepare offensive cyber-operations, were among the US government's most closely held secrets. Deciphering the archive and the NSA's language
Glenn Greenwald
#19. The way things are supposed to work is that we're supposed to know virtually everything about what they [the government] do: that's why they're called public servants. They're supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that's why we're called private individuals.
Glenn Greenwald
#20. The word love doesn't count when the word ya comes right after it.
Tommy Greenwald
#21. 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
#22. The key question: will the NSA continue to monitor hundreds of millions of people without any suspicion? Under Obama's proposals: Yes.
Glenn Greenwald
#23. [N]othing is less reliable than unchecked claims from political officials that their secret conduct is justified by National Security Threats and the desire to Keep Us Safe.
Glenn Greenwald
#24. Democracy requires accountability and consent of the governed, which is only possible if citizens know what is being done in their name.
Glenn Greenwald
#25. 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
#26. The disaster in the Gulf was no accident. It was the result of years of oil money buying off politicians to lead to an unregulated and ill focused addiction to oil and drilling. The doomed fate of the local fisherman and the environment were foretold in the infamous chants of 'Drill, Baby, Drill.'
Robert Greenwald
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. First, love one another very deeply, and don't be ashamed to express your love openly and often. Also, enjoy one another, and guard zealously your time together so as to enjoy it to the fullest extent.
Laura Greenwald
#30. Significant and seemingly impossible social and political change happens more often than we think, and it happens more rapidly than we realize. Even the most momentous change is always possible if one finds the right way to make it happen.
Glenn Greenwald
#31. When you start out in this business, the Hall of Fame is not what you're thinking about. You think all you want to do is make it to the major leagues. That's your goal, and that's your ambition as a broadcaster, just as it is with playing.
Hank Greenwald
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. And in every instance, the motive is the same: suppressing dissent and mandating compliance.
Glenn Greenwald
#35. Many American pundits and foreign policy experts love to depict themselves as crusaders for human rights, but it almost always takes the form of condemning other governments, never their own.
Glenn Greenwald
#36. 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
#37. The true measurement of a person's worth isn't what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs," he said. "If you're not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren't real.
Glenn Greenwald
#38. 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
#39. The purpose of whistleblowing is to expose secret and wrongful acts by those in power in order to enable reform.
Glenn Greenwald
#40. Incestuous, homogeneous fiefdoms of self-proclaimed expertise are always rank-closing and mutually self-defending, above all else.
Glenn Greenwald
#41. Today's Valentine's Day. There's a whole day devoted solely to love. Does that make any sense? Nah. Love makes us all crazy. But it's fun too.
Lisa Greenwald
#42. A president who is burdened with a failed and unpopular war, and who has lost the trust of the country, simply can no longer govern. He is destined to become as much a failure as his war.
Glenn Greenwald
#43. 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
#44. Those [American Jews] who favor the [Israeli] attack on Gaza are certainly guilty of such overwhelming emotional and cultural attachment to Israel and Israelis, that they long ago ceased viewing this conflict with any remnant of objectivity.
Glenn Greenwald
#45. 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
#46. The lesson for me was clear: national security officials do not like the light. They act abusively and thuggishly only when they believe they are safe, in the dark. Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only real antidote.
Glenn Greenwald
#47. People who suffer from depression have better memory than people who don't, because part of our ability to survive and not to be depressed is to forget a lot of stuff.
Anthony Greenwald
#48. I'd like to vote for the candidate similar to the one the Right absurdly claims Obama is.
Glenn Greenwald
#49. When you buy a new pair of shoes you can start all fresh again and have confendce on what you are going
Lisa Greenwald
#50. Bush violated FISA [ ... ] because he wanted to violate the law in order to establish the general 'principle' that he was not bound by the law, to show that he has the power to break the law, that he is more powerful than the law.
Glenn Greenwald
#51. 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
#52. The same president who has insisted that core moralism drives him has brought America to its lowest moral standing in history.
Glenn Greenwald
#53. Free speech rights means that government officials are barred from creating lists of approved and disapproved political ideas and then using the power of the state to enforce those preferences.
Glenn Greenwald
#54. I like to tell people that I finally found something I'm really good at, and that's retirement.
Hank Greenwald
#56. People may be surprised at how hard and difficult filmmaking can be, having the creativity and the technical aspects together is very hard to do.
Robert Greenwald
#58. I don't have a 'side' - I'm responsible for what I say and nothing else.
Glenn Greenwald
#59. The beauty of the human soul Is not the pretty face. It's found within the heart and hands Of those who look - and stay.
Laura Greenwald
#60. Terrorism': the word that means nothing, yet justifies everything.
Glenn Greenwald
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. It's common to go from 'crashing the gate' to guarding it.
Glenn Greenwald
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. When you cheer for the erosion of Dzhokhar Tsarnaevs rights, you're cheering for the erosion of your own.
Glenn Greenwald
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. The email began: The security of people's communications is very important to me,
Glenn Greenwald
#72. 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
#73. When journalists are 'accused' of being 'advocates', that means: challenging and deviating from DC orthodoxies.
Glenn Greenwald
#74. 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
#75. My nature is that when I see abuses of power, I want to expose those abuses.
Glenn Greenwald
#76. 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
#77. The past is remembered as if it were a drama in which the self was the leading player
Anthony Greenwald
#78. Terrorist', noun: 1. Someone my government tells me is a terrorist; 2. Someone my President decides to kill.
Glenn Greenwald
#79. Virtually every time the U.S. fires a missile from a drone and ends the lives of Muslims, American media outlets dutifully trumpet in headlines that the dead were 'militants' - even though those media outlets literally do not have the slightest idea of who was actually killed.
Glenn Greenwald
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. There are no bad days in the market. When the market is down, you've got bargains, and it's lovely to think of what you are buying at low prices. When the market is up, the bargains have gone, but you're rich.
Bruce Greenwald
#83. Abused in this way, law becomes a tool - both domestically and internationally - by which the powerful can coerce and control the powerless, rather than a system for ensuring that all are subjected to common rules. Nowhere
Glenn Greenwald
#84. Progress both in the United States and other nations was only ever achieved through the ability to challenge power and orthodoxies and to pioneer new ways of thinking and living.
Glenn Greenwald
#85. For a thirty-day period ending in February 2013, one unit of the NSA collected more than three billion pieces of communication data from US communication systems
Glenn Greenwald
#86. Obama supporters pretended that his 2008 campaign was some sort of populist uprising even as Wall Street overwhelmingly supported his candidacy.
Glenn Greenwald
#87. Washington likes to threaten the people over whom they exercise power.
Glenn Greenwald
#88. 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
#90. 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
#91. Even though the Koch brothers' businesses put 4.4 million people at risk with pollutants, the Kochs have poured millions into lobbyists' coffers and political contributions to ensure their bottom line stays unchanged by the most basic safety precaution.
Robert Greenwald
#93. 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
#94. Those are just some of the people whom we interviewed in the documentary, but that should provide you with a good sense of the credibility of the individuals who bolster the case that this administration lied us into a war.
Robert Greenwald
#95. The ego is a self-justifying historian which seeks only that information that agrees with it, rewrites history when it needs to, and does not even see the evidence that threatens it.
Anthony Greenwald
#96. 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
#97. We all instinctively understand that the private realm is where we can act, think, speak, write, experiment, and choose how to be, away from the judgmental eyes of others. Privacy is a core condition of being a free person.
Glenn Greenwald
#98. 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
#99. The highest compliment one can give a writer is not to say that one wholeheartedly agrees with his observations, but that he provoked - really, forced - difficult thinking about consequential matters and internal questioning of one's own assumptions, often without quick or clear resolution.
Glenn Greenwald
#100. 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
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