Privacy Quotes

Maybe all of us at Hailsam had little secrets like that -- little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone without fears and longing.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

I do not tell her about how much I look forward to going to the Wright barn. How those couple of hours in his studio feel like an escape, a refuge. Nor do I tell Rachel that I think Damian has the most beautiful hands I've ever seen, that he walks like a cat, that he has the clearest eyes, which seem able to see absolutely everything about me. That he seems to be the loneliest person I've ever met, and it breaks my heart. All of these things feel private. Precious. And I don't want to share them with Rachel. Not yet, anyway.

~ Lisa Ann Sandell

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves not others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies. Sabina despised literature in which people give away all kinds of intimate secrets about themselves and their friends. A man who loses his privacy loses everything, Sabina thought. And a man who gives it up on his own free will is a monster. That is why Sabina did not suffer in the least from having to keep her love a secret. On the contrary, only by doing so could she live the truth.

~ Milan Kundera

He has never told anyone this story. He doesn't mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past--within reason--but he doesn't mean to give away pieces of himself.

~ Hilary Mantel

Secrets,” Kohler finally said, “are a luxury we can no longer afford.

~ Dan Brown

But secluding my experience during that early period was both cowardly and wise. Some things are too fragile, too vulnerable to bring into the public eye. Tender things with tiny roots tend to wither in the glare of public scrutiny. By holding my awakening within, I contained the energy of it, and it fed me the way blood feeds muscle. It fed me a certain propelling energy, and I kept moving forward.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

And do you know the story about Haydn’s head? They cut it away from the still-warm cadaver so some insane scientist could take apart the brain and pinpoint the location of musical genius. And the Einstein Story? He’d carefully written his will with instructions to cremate him. They followed his orders, but his disciple, ever loyal and devoted, refused to live without the master’s gaze on him. Before the cremation, he took the eyes of the cadaver and put them in a bottle of alcohol to keep them watching him until the moment he should die himself. That’s why I said that the crematory fire is the only way our bodies can escape them. It’s the only absolute death. And I don’t want any other. Jean-Marc, I want an absolute death.

~ Milan Kundera

The public good must come before private interests.

~ Bryant Mcgill

It's idealistic, it's for love and gentleness, it's close to nature, it hurts nobody, it's voluntary. I can't see anything wrong with any of that.''Neither can I. The only trouble is, this commune will be inhabited by and surrounded by members of the human race.

~ Wallace Stegner

And so it is inevitable that the day has come when we write about privacy with such nostalgia, analysing it as we would some unearthed fossil of a creature our human eyes had never fallen on.

~ Aysha Taryam

What is a genius? A person who demands little to nothing from others, but is often found extremely difficult to have around.

~ Criss Jami

In any case, I hadn’t gone into the subject of dorm living too deeply with him, not because I hesitated to probe his tender spots but because I would have been probing my own. This is called tact, and is reputed to be a virtue.

~ Alexei Panshin

Oh, tell me, who first declared, who first proclaimed that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own real interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else… . Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child!

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

People feel uncomfortable when they have to divulge personal information during a police interrogation. Isn’t it strange that one-sixth of the world population spreads such information on social media?

~ Danny Mekić

On the corporate side, the upshot of our data (the benefit to us) isn't all that interesting unless you're an economist. In theory, your data means ads are better targeted, which means less marketing spend is wasted, which means lower prices. At the very least, the data they sell means you get to use genuinely useful services like Facebook and Google without paying money for them.

~ Christian Rudder

When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.

~ David Brin

The characters who go to make up my stories and novels are not portraits. Characters I invent along with the story that carries them. Attached to them are what I've borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, bit by bit, of persons I have seen or noticed or remembered in the flesh - a cast of countenance here, a manner of walking there, that jumps to the visualizing mind when a story is under way. I don't write by invasion into the life of a real person: my own sense of privacy is too strong for that; and I also know instinctively that living people to whom you are close - those known to you in ways too deep, too overflowing, ever to be plumbed outside love - do not yield to, could never fit into, the demands of a story. Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, that a character becomes in its own right another human being on the page.

~ Eudora Welty

There are many ways to honor America. This book is mine. I have completed this journey of self-education in the belief that the most terrifying possibility since 9/11 has not been terrorism--as frightening as that is--but the prospect that Americans will give up their rights in pursuing the chimera of security.

~ David K. Shipler

Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

~ Edward Snowden

Personalization is based on a bargain. In exchange for the service of filtering, you hand large companies an enormous amount of data about your daily life--much of whic you might not trust your friends with.

~ Eli Pariser

Since the 1970s, there has been a continual tendency to over-estimate the surveillance capacities of new technologies. In the sense of the physical invasion of privacy, surveillance comprises five sequential events: the capacity to observe; the act of observation; comprehension of what is seen; intervention on the basis of that knowledge; and a consequent change of behaviour by the subject. Too often the final four have been assumed from the possibility of the first.

~ David Vincent

He didn’t have regular email like everyone else. He couldn’t afford that digital fingerprint that the NSA, the CIA, the FBI and all the other espionage alphabeticals counted on for their privacy-bashing surveillance of the entire formerly free world.

~ Kenneth Eade

Questions are as supple as willow wands, it's easy to brush by them and slip them aside, and no one the worse for it.

~ Ellis Peters

Privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back.

~ Bob Dylan

I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity.

~ Salman Rushdie

I don't know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public, they forget that invisibility is a superpower.

~ Banksy

We need to have a measure of love and freedom at all times, even with the ones we love much in our lives.

~ Auliq Ice

There are skeletons in everyone's closet, things no one ever wants the world to discover.

~ Jodi Picoult

A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space, anything is possible. The greatest evil and the greatest good.

~ Rikki Ducornet

Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal’s or Faulkner’s.

~ Milan Kundera

'And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. We gamble with it, hoping that by exposing ourselves, someone will find a way in. This is why the human animal will always be vulnerable: because it wants to be.'

~ Max Barry

This should be one of the basic attitudes—not to think about what the other is doing. That is his life. If he decides to live it that way, that is his business. Who are you even to have an opinion about it? Even to have an opinion means that you are ready to interfere, you have already interfered.

~ Osho

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.

~ James Madison

Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determining our futures.

~ Edward Snowden

What man art thou that, thus bescreened in night,So stumblest on my counsel?*Who are you? Why do you hide in the darkness and listen to my private thoughts?*

~ William Shakespeare

The only way to stop big data from becoming big brother is introduce privacy laws that protect the basic human rights online.

~ Arzak Khan

There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.

~ Joan Didion

Never speak about private affairs for the general public to hear.

~ Habeeb Akande

Basically, I still have the privacy that all celebrities crave, except for those celebrities who feel that privacy reflects some kind of failure on their part.

~ Albert Brooks