It's important that we elevate and primarily focus on the rights of American citizens, but it's also important that we don't forget, 95 percent of the world's population lives beyond our own borders.
Edward SnowdenRead
I think it's important to remember that people don't set their lives on fire. They don't walk away from their extraordinarily, extraordinarily comfortable lives ... for no reason.
Interpretation
People typically don't make drastic changes in their lives without a significant reason or motivation.
Edward Snowden emphasizes the idea that individuals tend to maintain their comfortable lives unless compelled by strong reasons to make drastic decisions. This quote prompts reflection on the motivations behind significant life choices and the inherent comfort many people feel in their current situations.
In practice
In a motivational speech about pursuing personal growth and change.
It's important that we elevate and primarily focus on the rights of American citizens, but it's also important that we don't forget, 95 percent of the world's population lives beyond our own borders.
I think the most important idea is to remember that there have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal.
Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting?
A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all.
Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him... the better off we all are.
I don't see myself as a hero because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.
But Nature cast me for the part she found me best fitted for, and I have had to play it, and must play it till the curtain falls.
Neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had.
People ought to fight to keep their law as to defend the city s walls.
...the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.
No matter how noble the objectives of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion; it is an evil government.
All lives have an equal value.
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