"If you have a certain amount of time to spend on advancing the cause of greater personal privacy, can you do it better by using the time to learn about cryptography and develop the tools to protect privacy, or by convincing your government not to invade your privacy?" — Wei Dai (Cypherpunks mailing list, 1995) #privacy #cryptography

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." — John Gilmore (Time Magazine, 1993) #censorship #internet #freedom

"Withdrawing into technology is like pulling the blankets over your head. It feels good for a while, until reality catches up. The next Clipper or Digital Telephony proposal will provide a rude awakening." — Hal Finney (Politics vs Technology, 1994) #politics #warning

"There is power in knowing. By protecting our privacy, we prevent others from being empowered with knowledge about us that can be used against our interests." — Carissa Véliz (Privacy is power (Aeon), 2019) #privacy #power #knowledge #surveillance

"I never understood the classical notion of a key distribution center, which is a trusted resource that you have to share." — Whitfield Diffie (ITAS Interview, 1992) #cryptography #trust

"These legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law." — Moxie Marlinspike (We Should All Have Something To Hide, 2013) #law #civildisobedience #democracy #change

"Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it." — Eric Hughes (A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 1993) #cypherpunk #code

"Since cryptography is a tool for shifting power, the people who know this subject well, like it or not, inherit some of that power." — Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015) #cryptography

"When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs." — Hal Finney (BitcoinTalk Forum, 2013) #bitcoin #satoshi #history

"I don't 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." — Edward Snowden (The Guardian Interview, 2013) #surveillance #privacy #freedom

"Pretty Good Privacy empowers people to take their privacy into their own hands. There has been a growing social need for it." — Philip Zimmermann (Why I Wrote PGP, 1991) #pgp #privacy #empowerment

"The key question at the heart of the cypherpunk movement was not freedom, but the crisis of freedom in a situation of extensive social control of dominant institutions over private individuals." — Enrico Beltramini (Against technocratic authoritarianism, 2020) #cypherpunk #freedom #surveillance #control

"What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If a nonconformist tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope, it would draw suspicion." — Philip Zimmermann (Why I Wrote PGP, 1991) #privacy #encryption #conformity

"The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen." — Julian Assange (Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, 2012) #internet #surveillance #totalitarianism

"Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world." — Eric Hughes (A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 1993) #privacy #secrecy

"You use envelopes for postal mail. You use it for love letters, business letters and your medical records. The only way to create the digital equivalent of an envelope is to encrypt." — Philip Zimmermann (GrepLaw, 2003) #encryption #privacy #email #envelopes

"Just as a merchant will accept cash from a customer without demanding proof of identity, we also want our electronic money system to allow similar transactions to take place, without the identity of the people involved being revealed to each other, or even to someone who is monitoring the network." — Hal Finney (Protecting privacy with electronic cash, 1993) #digitalcash #anonymity #privacy

"Cypherpunk cryptography has been described as crypto with an attitude. But it is much more than that, for, more than anything else, what the cypherpunks wanted was crypto with values." — Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015) #cypherpunk #cryptography

"If the federal government had access to every email you've ever written and every phone call you've ever made, it's almost certain that they could find something you've done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don't know it yet." — Moxie Marlinspike (We Should All Have Something To Hide, 2013) #privacy #surveillance #law #nothingtohide

"Be interested in liberty and the freedom to transact and speak to get back to the original motivations. Don't spend time trying to make government-friendly financial alternatives." — Tim May (CoinDesk, 2018) #liberty #freedom #transactions #government