PRIVACY QUOTES II

quotations about privacy

Privacy quote

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

Tags: Robert Browning


He has not spent his life badly who has passed it from his birth to his burial in privacy.

HORACE

attributed, Day's Collacon

Tags: Horace


To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.

ANTHONY BURGESS

Homage to Qwert Yuiop: Essays


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


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

Tags: Chuck Palahniuk


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

Tags: Christopher Hitchens


There is no such thing as privacy anymore; there is secrecy.

RICH HERSH

attributed, Instagram


Who are you? Why do you hide in the darkness and listen to my private thoughts?

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Romeo and Juliet

Tags: William Shakespeare


A private life is not only more pleasant, but more happy than any princely state.

REV. R. BAIRD

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

Tags: Ayn Rand


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


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

Tags: Francis Quarles


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

Tags: James Madison


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


All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.

KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD

Modes and Morals


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


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


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


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