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" Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now. "

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" Even though we may focus first on the rights of our own country, that does not mean that we should disregard the rights of everyone else. "

" I think the most important idea is to remember that there have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal. "

" That's the beauty of the Internet is that we're no longer tied to our communities by physical connections. "

" Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting? "

" Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it. "

" I don't want to harm my government. I want to help my government. But the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they're willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society and say, 'Hey, this is not appropriate.' "

" 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. "

" You shouldn't change your behavior because a government agency somewhere is doing the wrong thing. If we sacrifice our values because we're afraid, we don't care very much about those values. "

" Every person remembers some moment in their life where they witnessed some injustice, big or small, and looked away because the consequences of intervening seemed too intimidating. But there's a limit to the amount of incivility and inequality and inhumanity that each individual can tolerate. I crossed that line. And I'm no longer alone. "

" I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building. "

" Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you are being watched and recorded. "

" It's been vindicating to see the reaction from lawmakers, judges, public bodies around the world, civil liberties activists who have said it's true that we have a right to at least know the broad outlines of what our government's doing in our name and what it's doing against us. "

" I do agree that when it comes to cyber warfare, we have more to lose than any other nation on earth. "

" I'm an engineer, not a politician. "

" I've been a spy for almost all of my adult life - I don't like being in the spotlight. "

" The public interest is not always the same as the national interest. Going to war with people who are not our enemy in places that are not a threat doesn't make us safe, and that applies whether it's in Iraq or on the Internet. The Internet is not the enemy. Our economy is not the enemy. "

" All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed. That is a milestone we left a long time ago. "

" It may be that by watching everywhere we go, by watching everything we do, by analyzing every word we say, by waiting and passing judgment over every association we make and every person we love, that we could uncover a terrorist plot, or we could discover more criminals. But is that the kind of society we want to live in? "

" I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things... 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. "

" Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him... the better off we all are. "

" If I had to describe myself, I wouldn't use words like 'hero.' I wouldn't use 'patriot,' and I wouldn't use 'traitor.' I'd say I'm an American and I'm a citizen, just like everyone else. "

" I have had no contact with the Chinese government. I only work with journalists. "

" We're losing our way as a society. If we don't stand up, if we don't say what we think those rights should be, and if we don't protect them, we will very soon find out that we do not have them. "

" I think it's important to remember that people don't set their lives on fire. They don't walk away from their extraordinarily, extraordinarily comfortable lives ... for no reason. "

" I have no regrets. "

" You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk. "

" Sometimes the scandal is not what law was broken, but what the law allows. "

" I don't see myself as a hero because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity. "

" The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law. "

" The NSA and Israel wrote Stuxnet together. "