200 Quotes by Glenn Greenwald

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.

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.

The more fear confrontational activism can put into the heart of the political class, the better.

The government usually announces it killed a Big Terrorist 5 or 6 different times before they’re dead – they’re almost like cats.

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.

The ultimate test of a society’s freedom is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens; it’s how it treats its dissidents.

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.

If you remove the fear of criminal punishment for the nation’s political and financial elites – as we have done – what possible constraint on their behavior does anyone think will remain?

It’s hard to imagine a more potent sign of a weak, declining empire than having one’s national ‘credibility’ depend upon periodically bombing other countries.