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
He has not spent his life badly who has passed it from his birth to his burial in privacy.
HORACE
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
Who are you? Why do you hide in the darkness and listen to my private thoughts?
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Romeo and Juliet
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
To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
ANTHONY BURGESS
Homage to Qwert Yuiop: Essays
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
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
Private life favoreth happiness.
SEE-MA-KOANG
attributed, Day's Collacon
There is a self-imposed privacy less easily invaded than convent walls.
HENRY THEODORE TUCKERMAN
The Optimist: A Series of Essays
Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Asfixia
A private life is not only more pleasant, but more happy than any princely state.
REV. R. BAIRD
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
Private interests must yield to public good.
EDMUND GETTY
The Last King of Ulster
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
Who could deny that privacy is a jewel? It has always been the mark of privilege, the distinguishing feature of a truly urbane culture. Out of the cave, the tribal tepee, the pueblo, the community fortress, man emerged to build himself a house of his own with a shelter in it for himself and his diversions. Every age has seen it so. The poor might have to huddle together in cities for need's sake, and the frontiersman cling to his neighbors for the sake of protection. But in each civilization, as it advanced, those who could afford it chose the luxury of a withdrawing-place.
PHYLLIS MCGINLEY
"A Lost Privilege", The Province of the Heart
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
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
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
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