Glenn Greenwald quotes - page 2

Today, for many in the profession, praise from the government for "responsible" reporting-for taking its direction about what should and should not be published-is a badge of honor. That this is the case is the true measure of how far adversarial journalism in the United States has fallen. (Glenn Greenwald)
There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States, but around the world. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
Free speech rights means that government officials are barred from creating lists of approved and disapproved political ideas and then using the power of the state to enforce those preferences. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
Obama supporters pretended that his 2008 campaign was some sort of populist uprising even as Wall Street overwhelmingly supported his candidacy. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
I personally think honestly disclosing rather than hiding one's subjective values makes for more honest and trustworthy journalism. But no journalism - from the most stylistically 'objective' to the most brazenly opinionated - has any real value unless it is grounded in facts, evidence, and verifiable data. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
Some of the surveillance was ostensibly devoted to terrorism suspects. But great quantities of the programs manifestly had nothing to do with national security. The documents left no doubt that the NSA was equally involved in economic espionage, diplomatic spying, and suspicionless surveillance aimed at entire populations. Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
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. [...] A population, a country that venerates physical safety above all other values will ultimately give up its liberty and sanction any power seized by authority in exchange for the promise, no matter how illusory, of total security. However, absolute safety is itself chimeric, pursued but never obtained. The pursuit degrades those who engage in it as well as any nation that comes to be defined by it. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
And it's so ironic they [the Democratic Party] spent four years claiming they are fighting fascism and authoritarianism, and what are they trying to do now? They're trying to harness corporate and monopoly power to silence everyone who disagrees with them, the very hallmark, the epitome of the fascism they claim to be fighting, but which in reality they embody. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
The term propaganda rings melodramatic and exaggerated, but a press that-whether from fear, careerism, or conviction-uncritically recites false government claims and reports them as fact, or treats elected officials with a reverence reserved for royalty, cannot be accurately described as engaged in any other function. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
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? View quote
Glenn Greenwald
The way things are supposed to work is that we're supposed to know virtually everything about what they [the government] do: that's why they're called public servants. They're supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that's why we're called private individuals. (Glenn Greenwald)
The single most remarkable (and revealing) fact of the Obama presidency may very well be the lack of a single prosecution of Wall Street executives for the massive fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
A key purpose of journalism is to provide an adversarial check on those who wield the greatest power by shining a light on what they do in the dark, and informing the public about those acts. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
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. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
Fearlessness can be its own form of power. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
I think that - not just as a journalist but as a human being - I have the ethical responsibility to avoid actions that can harm innocent people. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
Whether a country is actually free is determined not by how well-rewarded its convention-affirming media elites are and how ignored its passive citizens are but by how it treats its dissidents, those posing authentic challenges to what the government does. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
As a journalist, I think the only question that you ask yourself - once you've determined that the material is authentic - is what is in the public interest to know. And then you go about and report it. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
He's the President-it's the responsibility of every citizen to criticize aggressively when they think it's warranted. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
American political culture quickly and always outpaces any attempt to satirize it. (Glenn Greenwald)
The more fear confrontational activism can put into the heart of the political class, the better. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
As always, imagine how great the press corps would be if it devoted 1/1000th the energy to dissecting non-sex political wrongdoing. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
The genius of America's endless war machine is that, learning from the unpleasantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible. View quote
Glenn Greenwald
A lot of these people are Iraqis fighting for control of their own government. Maybe there's an argument to make that outside forces that go in and start bombing that country or invading that country are actually terrorists more so than the people in the country. View quote
Glenn Greenwald