I understood the importance in principle of public key cryptography but it's all moved much faster than I expected. I did not expect it to be a mainstay of advanced communications technology.

I thought cryptography was a technique that did not require your trusting other people-that if you encrypted your files, you would have the control to make the choice as to whether you would surrender your files.

Some people make sharp distinctions sort of between their recreational musings and their professional work. I don't make that distinction very much.

Lots of people working in cryptography have no deep concern with real application issues. They are trying to discover things clever enough to write papers about.

I liked Berkeley tremendously, Berkeley was a very leftist campus. I came to love that city as much as I love Paris or the south of France or New York.

If you have ambition, you might not achieve anything, but without ambition, you are almost certain not to achieve anything.

People meet in bars after work all over the world and talk about the great problems of life and death and the world and politics and they don't take themselves seriously. They can do nothing else except chat about these things in bars after work.

Two people can work on a problem better than one.

One of the things that characterizes good intellectual work is a certain self-importance.

We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions.

I understood the importance in principle of public key cryptography but it's all moved much faster than I expected. I did not expect it to be a mainstay of advanced communications technology.

Cloud computing is a challenge to security, but one that can be overcome.

Cloud computing means you are doing your computing on somebody else's computer. Looking ahead a little, I firmly believe cloud - previously called grid computing - will become very widespread. It's much cheaper than buying your own computing infrastructure, or maybe you don't have the power to do what you want on your own computer.

I am not convinced that lack of encryption is the primary problem. The problem with the Internet is that it is meant for communications among non-friends.

I certainly enjoy going on stage and lecturing and talking to Congress. That's a personality explanation. And given government proposals, I thought I had a clear view that they were antagonistic to human freedom.

I really believe in the radical viewpoint. And I have always believed that one's politics and the character of his particular work are inseparable.

I think that the people who are trying to shut down WikiLeaks are going to have to accept this as a fact of reality that cryptography allows you to do this kind of thing.

I thought of computers as very low class. I thought of myself as a pure mathematician and was interested in partial differential equations and topology and things like that.

If you depend on a secret for your security, what do you do when the secret is discovered? If it is easy to change, like a cryptographic key, you do so. If it's hard to change, like a cryptographic system or an operating system, you're stuck. You will be vulnerable until you invest the time and money to design another system.

Intellectual work is essentially a lonely process, and if you can find a way of doing something so that you're in company without being disturbed, that, for me, is the critical thing. I often get to feel isolated so often if I'm sitting either where there aren't people or isn't a view.

It's simply unrealistic to depend on secrecy for security in computer software. You may be able to keep the exact workings of the program out of general circulation, but can you prevent the code from being reverse-engineered by serious opponents? Probably not. The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets.

No right of private conversation was enumerated in the Constitution. I suppose it never occurred to anyone at the time that it could be prevented.

People constantly face problems they've never seen before, and they have to solve them somehow. So a million people come up with a million solutions that are just a little bit different. If computing is being done by fewer resources, there will be enormous security gains by pushing things into standard practices.

The decisions we make about communication security today will determine the kind of society we live in tomorrow.

The most important impact of technology on communications security is that it draws better and better traffic into vulnerable channels.

We have experienced an utter explosion in investigative techniques. Walk the streets, look at the cameras! They are now recognising people automatically from photos; we have DNA fingerprinting, infrascan photos that can identify you from the veins in your face.

Without strong encryption, you will be spied on systematically by lots of people.

The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets.

It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.

The sanctity of our battlefields, monuments, and veterans institutions is of utmost importance to preserve military history and pay respect to those who fought.

Research is of considerable importance in certain fields, such as science and history.

The education of my brother and myself was of paramount importance to my parents, and in addition to their strong encouragement, they were prepared to make any sacrifice to further our intellectual development.

What I have learned from my work up to now, is to try to be open, but also protect myself by not letting the good and the evil get too much importance.

While I recognize the great value and importance of prescription drugs and strongly support a continued U.S. focus on pharmaceutical research and development, our nation's seniors cannot be asked to subsidize the drug costs of other wealthy industrialized nations any longer.

It is seldom in life that one knows that a coming event is to be of crucial importance.

Similarly, the problem of the rights of the state in the disposition of inheritances left by individuals presents social aspects of the first importance.

The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.

My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.

Absent scandal, a federal judge can serve for decades on the bench, underscoring the importance of appointing judges who have a proper understanding of their constitutional role.

With respect to the FBI, they had problems communicating in a vertical way, within the FBI itself, so that information of importance could get pushed up to those who were decision-makers.

It's hard to exaggerate the importance of preserving the financial integrity of Social Security.

The high food value of field beans and the shortage of supply due to the light yields of 1915 and 1916 render them of great importance in the regions to which they are adapted.

It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison with what we owe others.

Malcolm was a firm believer in the value and importance of our heritage. He believed that we have valuable and distinct cultural traditions which need to be institutionalized so that they can be passed on to our heirs.

I believe 100 percent in the power and importance of music.

What does gene A do? What does gene B do? What does it do in different contexts? What's its importance? We know the answer to that for a very small number of genes, the ones that made themselves evident many years ago.

It is necessary to be concerned about the importance of educating a really beautiful human spirit.

Churchill knew the importance of peace, and he also knew the price of it. Churchill finally got his voice, of course. He stressed strategy, but it was his voice that armed England at last with the old-fashioned moral concepts of honor and duty, justice and mercy.

Character is better than ancestry, and personal conduct is of more importance than the highest.