Privacy matters; privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.

There was a real choice when [Barack Obama] became president. It was a very difficult choice - to say, "We're not going to hold senior officials to account with the same laws that every other citizen in the country is held to," or "This is a nation that believes in the rule of law."

Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they'll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it.

If you’re not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren’t real.

The authoritarian one believed that an individual's rights were basically provided by governments and were determined by states. The other society - ours - tended to believe that a large portion of our rights were inherent and couldn't be abrogated by governments, even if this seemed necessary.

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.

I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things.