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"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."
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"One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge."
Explore more quotes by Whitfield Diffie


"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."


"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."


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


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


"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."


"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 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."
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