quotations about privacy
I give the fight up: let there be an end,
A privacy, an obscure nook for me.
I want to be forgotten even by God.
ROBERT BROWNING
Paracelsus
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
Letters and Other Writings of James Madison
All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.
KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD
Modes and Morals
There is no such thing as privacy anymore; there is secrecy.
RICH HERSH
attributed, Instagram
There is a sacred realm of privacy for every man and woman where he makes his choices and decisions--a realm of his own essential rights and liberties into which the law, generally speaking, must not intrude.
GEOFFREY FISHER
Look Magazine, March 17, 1959
But she has gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and lying on top of each other on the Cambridge Common, prefer their privacy.
JHUMPA LAHIRI
The Namesake
Maybe all of us ... 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
Never Let Me Go
Intimacy is an important part of a happy relationship, but so is a healthy respect for each other's privacy.
LESLIE BECKER-PHELPS
"How Much Privacy Is Good for a Relationship?", WebMD, June 1, 2016
There is a privacy in every man's conduct that policy should teach him to retain.
NORMAN MACDONALD
attributed, Day's Collacon
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
AYN RAND
The Fountainhead
In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
Privacy is a protection from the unreasonable use of state and corporate power. But that is, in a sense, a secondary thing. In the first instance, privacy is the statement in words of a simple understanding, which belongs to the instinctive world rather than the formal one, that some things are the province of those who experience them and not naturally open to the scrutiny of others: courtship and love, with their emotional nakedness; the simple moments of family life; the appalling rawness of grief. That the state and other systems are precluded from snooping on these things is important -- it is a strong barrier between the formal world and the hearth, extended or not -- but at root privacy is a simple understanding: not everything belongs to everyone.
NICK HARKAWAY
The Blind Giant
Privacy is the space bad people need to do bad things in.
PAUL MCMULLAN
statement to the Leveson Inquiry, November 29, 2011
Excessive privacy and constant retirement are apt to make men out of humor with others, and too fond of themselves.
REV. J. CAIRD
attributed, Day's Collacon
Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order ... and the like.
WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS
Points of Rebellion
Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Asfixia
The types of collection in the book -- microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us -- are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person.
EDWARD SNOWDEN
"Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission's accomplished", Washington Post, December 23, 2013
All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
Privacy is no longer a condition of American life, and is likely in the future to be something that only the rich will be able to purchase.
LEE RAINIE
"Making Information Pay: Is Privacy Becoming a Commodity?", Publishers Weekly, May 27, 2016
There is a palpable sense that the dynamic of privacy has changed from one in which you are private by default, to one in which you are public by default, and private by effort.
LEE RAINIE
"Making Information Pay: Is Privacy Becoming a Commodity?", Publishers Weekly, May 27, 2016