PRIVACY QUOTES II
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
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
We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.
WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS
dissenting opinion, Osborn v. United States, 1966
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
There is a privacy in every man's conduct that policy should teach him to retain.
NORMAN MACDONALD
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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
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
The privacy that older generations once enjoyed is now the stuff of nostalgia. Younger people have a different understanding of what it entails. Those who grew up being able to stay in constant touch with their friends have come of age and are reshaping the world accordingly. We live in times when a personal relationship can be jettisoned because a digital message goes unanswered for a few minutes too long, where couples announce their decisions to divorce on Instagram.
EDITOR
The Nation, May 28, 2016
Privacy is the space bad people need to do bad things in.
PAUL MCMULLAN
statement to the Leveson Inquiry, November 29, 2011
Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Asfixia
All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
ANTHONY BURGESS
Homage to Qwert Yuiop: Essays
There is no such thing as privacy anymore; there is secrecy.
RICH HERSH
attributed, Instagram
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
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
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
A private life is not only more pleasant, but more happy than any princely state.
REV. R. BAIRD
attributed, Day's Collacon
Demean thyself more warily in thy study than in the street; if thy public actions have a hundred witnesses, thy private have a thousand. The multitude looks but upon thy actions; thy conscience looks into them.
FRANCIS QUARLES
Enchiridion Institutions
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