Privacy Quotes

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

The most reliable topic for small talk is the goings-on of stars whether they’re rising or falling, and whether nor not a particular story is truth or fiction. This is way out of balance. It invades the privacy of men and women who didn’t give up being human when they became famous, and it negates the meaning inherent in our own lives. (300)

It was like setting up a guillotine in the public square.You don't expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it.

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.

When you fake emotion for a living, when you make your money providing fantasies for other people, tuning into their worlds and indulging them, you don’t invite someone into your world very easily.

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

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.

While you were busy trying to prove God stands behind you, God was before me lighting the trail, so he could lead us both.

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.

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 therefore you have no right to question me as if you represent the common good.

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

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]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.

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

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

You know something is wrong when the government declares opening someone else’s mail is a felony but your internet activity is fair game for data collecting.

A desire for privacy does not imply shameful secrets; Moglen argues, again and again, that without anonymity in discourse, free speech is impossible, and hence also democracy. The right to speak the truth to power does not shield the speaker from the consequences of doing so; only comparable power or anonymity can do that.

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.

I suppose you come in here often, then,” I say, half teasing. “Bringing your maids and admirers?”Magiano frowns at that. He shakes his head. “You think I’m bedding every maid I speak to?” he says and shrugs. “Flattered, Your Majesty. But you are very wrong.”“So, what you’re telling me is that you come to this secret space alone?”He tilts his head in a flirtatious way. “What’s wrong with a thief wanting a little private time now and then?” He comes closer. His breath warms my skin like the fog that hovers over the water. “Of course, here you are. I suppose I’m not alone, after all.

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 in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there.While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy.

You think knowing things will solve your private little griefs?

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

What people dont know about you people create. Imagination is a part of being human. They fill in the unknowns with assumptions and not facts. Every man and woman is a mystery unrevealed.

What is a genius? A person who demands little to nothing from others, but is often found extremely difficult to have around.

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.

Clothes falling away signals a situation that I'll likely avoid putting into words. If clothes don't dress it up, don't expect talk to, either.

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.

[L]ike poems, cruising carves privacy out of public spaces. Poems are a kind of private communication that occurs in public speech. And I think cruising is that too: a training in reading occult codes; a way of seeing a significance in the world that most people don’t see.

Always remember that you were once alone, and the crowd you see in your life today are just as unecessary as when you were alone.

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

I knelt and locked the door. I locked the door locking the world and time outside. I stretched my body across the mattress and Saskia drew in close to me and placed her open hand on my chest, her mouth near my shoulder; her breath, my breath blew out the candle, and I held my lost Wanderess with tenderness until sweet sleep overcame us.

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

I do not tell her about how much I look forward to going to the Wright barn. How those couple of hours in his studio feel like an escape, a refuge. Nor do I tell Rachel that I think Damian has the most beautiful hands I've ever seen, that he walks like a cat, that he has the clearest eyes, which seem able to see absolutely everything about me. That he seems to be the loneliest person I've ever met, and it breaks my heart. All of these things feel private. Precious. And I don't want to share them with Rachel. Not yet, anyway.

That hedge provides almost complete privacy from cars and pedestrians, and I would bet he and his wife do it more than the national average.

Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all fre

Listen, Harriet. I do unterstand. I know you don't want either to give or to take ... You don't want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person.""That's true. That's the truest thing you ever said.""All right. I can respect that. Only you've got to play the game. Don't force an emotional situation and then blame me for it.""But I don't want any situation. I want to be left in peace.

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.

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?