"In view of the serious implications of such a law, I abandoned my plans to charge for PGP in the hopes of achieving wider distribution." — Philip Zimmermann (GrepLaw, 2003) #pgp #encryption #government #backdoors

"Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions." — Tim May (The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, 1988) #cryptography #economics

"You can't awaken someone who's pretending to be asleep." — Edward Snowden (Joe Rogan Experience, 2019)

"Proprietary software is an injustice. It denies users freedom and keeps them divided and helpless." — Richard Stallman (Free Software, Free Society, 2002) #proprietarysoftware #freedom

"Stopping leaks is a new form of censorship. And in the same manner that very significant resources spent on China's firewall, the result is that anyone who's motivated can work around it." — Julian Assange (Forbes, 2010) #censorship #leaks

"In one direction lies unprecedented scrutiny and control of people's lives; in the other, secure parity between individuals and organizations. The shape of society in the next century may depend on which approach predominates." — David Chaum (Security Without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete, 1985) #privacy #surveillance

"We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity." — John Perry Barlow (A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996) #freespeech #conformity

"Cryptography was a technique that did not require your trusting other people." — Whitfield Diffie (ITAS Interview, 1992) #cryptography #trust #privacy

"If cryptography's most basic aim is to enable secure communications, how could it not be a colossal failure of our field when ordinary people lack even a modicum of communication privacy when interacting electronically?" — Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015) #cryptography #privacy

"Truth happens. We will succeed. Don't wait around for others to take action. We must dive head first without regard for consequences, and break the inertia of passivity." — Amir Taaki (The libbitcoin Manifesto, 2013) #resistance #freedom

"There is a war going on between those who would liberate crypto and those who would suppress it. The seemingly innocuous bunch strewn around this conference room represents the vanguard of the pro-crypto forces." — Steven Levy (Crypto Rebels (WIRED), 1993) #cryptography #cypherpunk #resistance #government

"That cryptographic work is deeply tied to politics is a claim so obvious that only a cryptographer could fail to see it." — Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015) #cryptography #politics

"Building security from day one is much easier than adding it on as an afterthought." — Martin Hellman (Charles Babbage Institute Oral History, 2004) #security

"The keyboard is the great equalizer — better than the Glock .45." — St. Jude (Jude Milhon) (Modem Grrrl (Wired), 1995) #technology #empowerment #equality #defense

"The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration." — Tim May (The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, 1988) #government #regulation

"By understanding that cypherpunk theory and practice each consist of two complementary dynamics—privacy/transparency, pro-active/re-active—it becomes possible to understand that the cypherpunk movement provides the basis for activists and citizens to resist large surveillance institutions." — Patrick D. Anderson (Of Cypherpunks and Sousveillance, 2022) #cypherpunk #privacy #transparency #resistance #surveillance

"Every action I took was out of a desire to enable people to have freedom and control over their own lives." — Ross Ulbricht (Letter to Judge Forrest, 2015) #freedom #autonomy

"If you see a proposal for an electronic money system, check to see whether it has the ability to preserve the privacy of financial transactions the way paper money does today. If not, realize that the proposal is designed to harm, not help, individual privacy." — Hal Finney (Protecting privacy with electronic cash, 1993) #digitalcash #privacy #warning

"A hash function should be a one-way function — easy to compute but difficult to reverse." — Ralph Merkle (A Certified Digital Signature, 1989) #cryptography

"There has never been a government that didn't sooner or later try to reduce the freedom of its subjects and gain more control over them, and there probably never will be one." — Wei Dai (Cypherpunks mailing list, 1995) #freedom #cypherpunk