50 Quotes by Whitfield Diffie

I have always believed the thesis that one's politics and the character of one's intellectual work are inseparable.

The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets.

If you say to people that they, as a matter of fact, can't protect their conversations, in particular their political conversations, I think you take a long step toward making a transition from a free society to a totalitarian society.

I liked Berkeley tremendously, Berkeley was a very leftist campus. I came to love that city as much as I love Paris or the south of France or New York.

Without strong encryption, you will be spied on systematically by lots of people.

I have been working on two problems for three years: one of them for 8 or 9 years, and one of them for 3, 4, 5 years.

Lots of people working in cryptography have no deep concern with real application issues. They are trying to discover things clever enough to write papers about.

I understood the importance in principle of public key cryptography but it’s all moved much faster than I expected. I did not expect it to be a mainstay of advanced communications technology.

Two people can work on a problem better than one.