My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.

After 9/11, many of the most important news outlets in America abdicated their role as a check to power - the journalistic responsibility to challenge the excesses of government - for fear of being seen as unpatriotic and punished in the market during a period of heightened nationalism.

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.

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

I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression.

I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions.

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

There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny - they should be setting the example of transparency.

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.

I would rather be without a state than without a voice.

When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.

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

All I can say right now is the U.S. government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.

I have been a systems engineer, systems administrator, a senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer.

Sometimes to do the right thing, you have to break a law. And the key there is in terms of civil disobedience. You have to make sure that what you're risking, what you're bringing onto yourself, does not serve as a detriment to anyone else. It doesn't hurt anybody else.

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 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.

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.

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.

Being a patriot doesn't mean prioritizing service to government above all else. Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen, from the violations of and encroachments of adversaries. And those adversaries don't have to be foreign countries.

Each justice enters the Supreme Court possessing a record of opinion by which he or she is measured, and that without threat of election or outside influence, they will apply the Constitution as they always have; thus, it's ridiculous to assert the opposite.

Judges are either partial to the Constitution or they aren't; they either believe that the document is perfect in its form and that rights like free speech don't ebb in and out of style - or they believe that it's an anachronistic document in a world that needs a malleable, living Constitution.

I no longer believe that every leftist simply has a different means of achieving a successful route for America as I did formerly.

The biggest threats to faith aren't anything outside of it: they come bearing the name. It's why I find it especially important to call it out - also why I find it especially repulsive when people who crow the loudest about being Christians and use it as a money-making scheme utterly betray the faith when not on camera or in a crowd.