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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The less there is of a phone, the more I like it.