Whitfield Diffie Quotations

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

Two people can work on a problem better than one

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

I have always believed the thesis that one's politics and the character of one's intellectual work are inseparable.

The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets.

If you say to people that they, as a matter of fact, can't protect their conversations, in particular their political conversations, I think you take a long step toward making a transition from a free society to a totalitarian society.

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.

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

I have been working on two problems for three years: one of them for 8 or 9 years, and one of them for 3, 4, 5 years.