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Glenn Greenwald Quotes | Quotes said by Glenn Greenwald

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #1

    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 Quote #2

    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 Quote #3

    American political culture quickly and always outpaces any attempt to satirize it.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #4

    As always, imagine how great the press corps would be if it devoted 1/1000th the energy to dissecting non-sex political wrongdoing

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #5

    Beyond all the other reasons not to do it, free speech assaults always backfire: they transform bigots into martyrs.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #6

    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 Quote #7

    But even when the principle of equal treatment was betrayed, American leaders in every era have emphatically affirmed it, not so much out of hypocrisy as out of aspiration. Indeed, for those who were devoted to justice, the persistence of inequality was precisely what made equality before the law so imperative.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #8

    Courage is contagious.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #9

    Embedded in 'The New York Times' institutional perspective and reporting methodologies are all sorts of quite debatable and subjective political and cultural assumptions about the world. And with some noble exceptions, 'The Times,' by design or otherwise, has long served the interests of the same set of elite and powerful factions.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #10

    Every time I do an interview people ask similar questions, such as What is the most significant story that you have revealed? […] There really is only one overarching point that all of these stories have revealed, and that is–and I say this without the slightest bit of hyperbole or melodrama; it's not metaphorical and it's not figurative; it is literally true–that the goal of the NSA and it's five eyes partners in the English speaking world–Canada, New Zealand, Australia and especially the UK–is to eliminate privacy globally, to ensure that there could be no human communications that occur electronically, that evades their surveillance net; they want to make sure that all forms of human communications by telephone or by Internet, and all online activities are collected, monitored, stored and analyzed by that agency and by their allies.

    That means, to describe that is to describe a ubiquitous surveillance state; you don't need hyperbole to make that claim, and you do not need to believe me when I say that that's their goal. Document after document within the archive that Edward Snowden provided us declare that to be their goal. They are obsessed with searching out any small little premise of the planet where some form of communications might take place without they being able to invade it.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #11

    Fearlessness can be its own form of power.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #12

    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 Quote #13

    Forgoing privacy in a quest for absolute safety is as harmful to a healthy psyche and life of an individual as it is to a healthy political culture. For the individual, safety first means a life of paralysis and fear, never entering a car or airplane, never engaging in an activity that entails risk, never weighing quality of life over quantity, and paying any price to avoid danger.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #14

    He's the President—it's the responsibility of every citizen to criticize aggressively when they think it's warranted.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #15

    Hinzu kommt der Ton, in dem die Medien des Establishments über Fehlverhalten der Regierung berichten. Die journalistische Kultur in den USA gebietet es, dass Reporter jegliche eindeutige oder konkrete Aussage vermeiden und auch noch so fragwürdige Behauptungen der Regierung in ihrer Berichterstattung berücksichtigen. Stattdessen benutzen sie eine Sprache, die der eigene Kolumnist der Washington Post, Erik Wemple, als politisch schwer gemäßigt verspottet: niemals etwas Eindeutiges sagen, sondern sowohl die Rechtfertigungen der Regierung als auch die konkreten Tatsachen in der gleichen Glaubwürdigkeit darstellen, was insgesamt den Effekt hat, dass Enthüllungen verwässert und zu einem häufig ebenso zusammenhang- wie belanglosen Brei verquirlt werden. Vor allem messen sie Behauptungen von offizieller Seite stets großes Gewicht bei, selbst wenn diese schlicht unwahr oder absichtlich falsch sind.
    Ebendieser ängstliche, servile Journalismus war es, der die Times, die Post und viele andere Medien veranlasste, in ihren Berichten über die Verhörmethoden während der Regierung Bush das Wort Folter tunlichst zu vermeiden, obwohl sie nicht das geringste Problem damit hatten, wenn die Regierung eines anderen Staates auf der Welt exakt die gleichen Methoden einsetzte.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #16

    I don't have a 'side'—I'm responsible for what I say and nothing else.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #17

    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 Quote #18

    I think Dianne Feinstein may be the most Orwellian political official in Washington.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #19

    I'd like to vote for the candidate similar to the one the Right absurdly claims Obama is.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #20

    I've praised Obama's record on same-sex equality as enthusiastically as anyone: it's one area where his record has been impressive. I understand, and have expressed, the emotional importance for LGBT Americans of his marriage announcement as well as its political significance.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #21

    If you expose what it is that we’re doing, if you inform your fellow citizens about all the things that we’re doing in the dark, we will destroy you. This is what their spate of prosecutions of whistleblowers have [sic] been about. It’s what trying to threaten journalists, to criminalize what they do, is about. It’s to create a climate of fear, so that nobody will bring accountability to them.

    It’s not going to work. I think it’s starting to backfire, because it shows their true character and exactly why they can’t be trusted to operate with power in secret. And we’re certainly not going to be deterred by it in any way. The people who are going to be investigated are not the people reporting on this, but are people like Dianne Feinstein and her friends in the National Security Agency, who need investigation and transparency for all the things that they’ve been doing.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #22

    Incestuous, homogeneous fiefdoms of self-proclaimed expertise are always rank-closing and mutually self-defending, above all else.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #23

    It is hard to imagine having a government more secretive than the United States. Virtually everything that government does, of any significance, is conducted behind an extreme wall of secrecy. The very few leaks that we’ve had over the last decade are basically the only ways that we’ve had to learn what our government is doing.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #24

    It is true that the Internet can be used to disseminate falsehoods quickly, but it just as quickly roots them out and exposes them in a way that the traditional model of journalism and its closed, insular, one-way form of communication could never do.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #25

    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 Quote #26

    It's almost hard to imagine anything more undemocratic than the view that political officials should not debate American wars in public, but only express concerns 'privately with the administration.' That's just a small sliver of Johnson's radicalism: replacing Feingold in the Senate with Ron Johnson would be a civil liberties travesty analogous to the economic travesty from, say, replacing Bernie Sanders with Lloyd Blankfein.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #27

    It's common to go from 'crashing the gate' to guarding it.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #28

    Many of the benefits from keeping terrorism fear levels high are obvious. Private corporations suck up massive amounts of Homeland Security cash as long as that fear persists, while government officials in the National Security and Surveillance State can claim unlimited powers and operate with unlimited secrecy and no accountability.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #29

    Michael Ledeen—a contributing editor of National Review and a Freedom Scholar at the influential neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute—wrote on the National Review blog in November 2006: 'I had and have no involvement with our Iraq policy'. I opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place.'

    Ledeen, however, wrote in August 2002 of 'the desperately-needed and long overdue war against Saddam Hussein' and when he was interviewed for Front Page Magazine the same month and asked, 'Okay, well if we are all so certain about the dire need to invade Iraq, then when do we do so?' Ledeen replied: 'Yesterday.' There is obvious, substantial risk in falsely claiming that one opposed the Iraq War notwithstanding a public record of support. But that war has come to be viewed as such a profound failure that that risk, at least in the eyes of some, is outweighed by the prospect of being associated with Bush's invasion.

  • Glenn Greenwald Quote #30

    Revealingly, the central function of the Constitution as law--the supreme law--was to impose limitations not on the behavior of ordinary citizens but on the federal government. The government, and those who ran it, were not placed outside the law, but expressly targeted by it. Indeed, the Bill of Rights is little more than a description of the lines that the most powerful political officials are barred from crossing, even if they have the power to do so and even when the majority of citizens might wish them to do so.

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