Quotes about privacy

Men are private. This I have learned. They are whole continents of privacy you can only go to the borders you can look in but you cannot enter.

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.

Two things a wise man never discloses to the public his money and his women.

I showed that privacy was an implicit right in Jewish law, probably going back to the second or third century, when it was elaborated on in a legal way.

Issues such as transparency often boil down to which side of - pick a number - 40 you're on. Under 40, and transparency is generally considered a good thing for society. Over 40, and one generally chooses privacy over transparency. On every side of this issue, hypocrisy abounds.

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

You need to establish a degree of privacy and solitude in order to write

As much as anything else, it was a stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn't quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.

I have to be alone very often. I'd be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That's how I re

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Solitude sometimes is best society.

The more I'm let alone and not worried the better I can function.

I know people who are embarrassed to be American. They don't like showing their passports. It's becoming a scary place. It takes someone very brave not to be quiet, someone who doesn't mind death threats, their life being turned upside down, news cameras outside their door. There is no freedom of speech in America anymore. They are not living up to the constitution. There's so much fear in America and control.

In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test.

Even though we don't know which companies the NSA has compromised – or by what means – knowing that they could have compromised any of them is enough to make us mistrustful of all of them. This is going to make it hard for large companies like Google and Microsoft to get back the trust they lost. Even if they succeed in limiting government surveillance. Even if they succeed in improving their own internal security. The best they'll be able to say is: "We have secured ourselves from the NSA, exce

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and record

[T]here is both an intrinsic and instrumental value to privacy. Intrinsically, privacy is precious to the extent that it is a component of a liberty. Part of citizenship in a free society is the expectation that one's personal affairs and physical person are inviolable so long as one remains within the law. A robust concept of freedom includes the freedom from constant and intrusive government surveillance of one's life. From this perspective, Fourth Amendment violations are objectionable for th

Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.

Saying of the ProphetPrivacyWhoever invades people´s privacy corrupts them.

The privacy of pride.

A professional man of letters, especially if he is much at war with unscrupulous enenemies, is naturally jealous of his privacy... so it was, I think, with Dryden.

The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual.

[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public.

All of a sudden, we've lost a lot of control. We can't turn off our internet; we can't turn off our smartphones; we can't turn off our computers. You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it's no

God waits for our permission and doesn’t invade our privacy as we do with others.Everybody has free choice.

The missing link between humans and apes? It's certainly those brutes who haven't yet learned to respect privacy.

Mr. de Pinto, the dog who protects sheep quickly learns how to direct them, and it becomes a habit. The people have been trained by their 'watchmen' to jump, and to trample what the 'watchmen' want trampled."I have found, that those who would guard the people are their governors. The government admits that it is a government. The press pretends that it is not. But what a pretense! You orchestrate entire populations. And who elected you? No one. You are self-appointed, you speak for no one, and t

Yet the possibility of information storage, beyond what men and governments ever had before, can make available at the touch of a button a man's total history (including remarks put on his record by his kindergarten teacher about his ability and character). And with the computer must be placed the modern scientific technical capability which exists for wholesale monitoring of telephone, cable, Telex and microwave transmissions which carry much of today's spoken and written communications. The co

The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work

Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publications, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. The purchase of a book or pamphlet today may result in a subpoena tomorrow. Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. W

These examples and many others demonstrate an alarming trend whereby the privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man's life at

We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from govern

This place does not feel like my country. It feels like countries I have read about where things are very bad. It feels, in fact, like exactly the kind of thing we were protesting against, but we thought it was elsewhere. It is not heartening to find that it has come to us.

The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.

I have not encouraged talk about man’s holy privacy, although I do respect and defend man’s right to have it.

If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

'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.'

It's important to be informed about issues like usability, reliability, security, privacy, and some of the inherent limitations of computers.

We demand privacy, yet we glorify those that break into computers.

I have as much privacy as a goldfish in a bowl.

The worst thing about being famous is the invasion of your privacy.

I hate that tabloid idea of anybody who is famous having to forfeit their privacy.

I feel like everyone has the right to privacy, even if you're the most famous person in the world.

No one can train you to be famous. How do you deal with the loss of anonymity, the loss of privacy? You have to be disciplined.

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?*

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

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.

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

Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen des loix toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie.(There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.)

The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize.

The sounds of silence are a dim recollection now, like mystery, privacy and paying attention to one thing — or one person — at a time.

I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

If I don't talk about it, it's either very displeasing or very precious to me.

It’s not the public opinion of what you are that matters, but the private personality of who you are!

Within perfect walls there is nothing worth protecting. There is, in fact, nothing. And so we exchange privacy for intimacy.

But there are other words for privacy and independence. They are isolation and loneliness.

So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

There are no secrets on the Internet

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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?

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

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

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.

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.

The public good must come before private interests.

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 w

The truth is like sunlight: It causes cancer.

Tact by its nature entails staying mum, prudently electing to forgo urging other people to pursue an alternative course of action. Creation of silent spaces in our own life and equitable distribution of periods of respite that allow for periods of equable inner reflection is necessary to spur personal growth. It is equally important to honor other people’s intrinsic need for periods of introspection, uninterrupted by unsolicited advice

When to others it's not lying. It's privacy.

Or was Chris thinking, as I was, that if we went tothe police and told our story, our faces would be splashed on the frontpages of every newspaper in the country? Would the glare of publicitymake up for what we'd lose? Our privacy-our need to stay together?Could we lose each other just to get even?

Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.

I’ve been accused of being cold, snobbish, distant. Those who know me well know that I’m nothing of the sort. If anything, the opposite is true. But is it too much to ask to want to protect your private life, your inner feelings?

I simply decided once and for all to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety and the urge to be a part of that circle of successful people, those who believe they have won who-knows-what

[I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.

Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.

There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy.

The U.S. Constitution protects our privacy from the prying eyes of government. It does not, however, protect us from the prying eyes of companies and corporations.

When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms.

You use your money to buy privacy because during most of your life you aren't allowed to be normal.

I have been called a nun with a switchblade where my privacy is concerned. I think there's a point where one says, that's for family, that's for me.

How can we have our privacy? How can we have our independence now in these times with these cameras? Because I think privacy and our solitude is really important.