PRIVACY QUOTES II
quotations about privacy
Who are you? Why do you hide in the darkness and listen to my private thoughts?
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Romeo and Juliet
Private life favoreth happiness.
SEE-MA-KOANG
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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
All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
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
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
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 trouble is that privacy is at once essential to, and in tension with, both freedom and security. A cabinet minister who keeps his mistress in satin sheets at the French taxpayer's expense cannot justly object when the press exposes his misuse of public funds. Our freedom to scrutinise the conduct of public figures trumps that minister's claim to privacy. The question is: where and how do we draw the line between a genuine public interest and that which is merely what interests the public?
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
"Whether it's hacking or the NSA, some of us don't accept that privacy is dead", The Guardian, October 31, 2013
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
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
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
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 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
For what reason have I this vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for my privacy, abandoned to me by men? My nearest neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is visible from any place but the hill-tops within half a mile of my own. I have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. But for the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
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
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
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