Quotes & Sayings About Anonymity

One of the things I think is really problematic about something like [government] spyware is that it isn't transparent - because of that anonymity and that secrecy, there aren't laws to regulate it. — Maggie Gyllenhaal

We're sorry for frightening you, Tris,' another voice says, 'but anonymity is integral to our operation. We mean you no harm.'
'Let go of me then!' I say, almost growling. All the hands holding me on the wall fall away.
'Who are you?' I demand.
'We are the Alliegiant,' the voice replies. 'And we are many, yet we are no one ... '
I can't help it: I laugh. — Veronica Roth

Hit them in their personal lives, visit their homes . Actively target U.S. military establishments within the United States ... strike hard and fast and retreat in anonymity. Select another location, strike again hard and fast and quickly retreat in anonymity ... Do not get caught. DO NOT GET CAUGHT. Do not get sent to jail. Stay alert, keep active, and keep fighting. — Craig Rosebraugh

Well, I don't think I've ever consciously come up with tricks and tools to, kind of, hide. I do think I'm a bit more vigilant, in terms of safety issues and things. And sometimes it is kind of nice to try to hold onto your anonymity. — Calista Flockhart

Social media's greatest assets - anonymity, 'virality,' interconnectedness - are also its main weaknesses. — Evgeny Morozov

Anonymity. Hiding, even when you're with others. Being quiet, unobtrusive. Forcing yourself to stay apart - emotionally, at least. It's a way of life. A protection. — Brandon Sanderson

It seems that anonymity prompts people to disregard civility. — Kyle Thomas Miller

Words are thought descriptors. They project thoughts from anonymity. They transfer thoughts into messages. Messages move the world. — William E. Jefferson

The ideology of liberal humanism found expression in the earliest reviews of Hardy's writing and remained a dominant force until the explosion of literary theory in the 1980s. It is a broad and still influential category. It endorses the moral value of the individual, and the strength of the human spirit. It prefers the integrity of an organic rural society to the anonymity and materialism of an urbanised and technological world. Applied to fiction, this ideology involves the naturalisation of the novel's world and its values, and the recognition of fictional character as presenting a unified subject. — Geoffrey Harvey

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. — Virginia Woolf

I used to have the Virgin music [stores], and I would go there and just go up the escalator and say to myself, 'I'm soaking in these last moments of anonymity.' I knew I was going to make it this far; I knew that this was going to happen — Kanye West

The Internet has spawned an abusive malevolent platform that cyber stalkers and trolls can use to harm people in the real world and ruin their victims lives forever with their permanent posts. Cyberspace can also be used to hunt those that prey on innocent people, so that those who live by the malicious words may also feel the repugnant feeling of being stalked and hunted even in their own false sense of anonymity. — Don A. Holbrook

I find it difficult to believe that Redditors don't understand that anonymity online is merely a facade; indeed, it's probably one of the reasons that revealing the identity of pseudonymous Redditors is looked on as such a huge betrayal. — John Scalzi

You can always find a stray negative comment on the Internet. It's like everybody loves to put negative comments on the Internet under the cloak of anonymity. — John Legend

You know what they say. They? — Brian Spellman

For decades, the men at Area 51 thought they'd take their secrets to the grave. At the height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some of the country's most covert projects. Conspiracy theories were left to popular imagination. — Annie Jacobsen

I still have anonymity, which is great. I can go out anywhere I want and no one ever recognizes me. — Chris Pine

Like flats of today, terraces of houses gained a certain anonymity from identical facades following identical floor plans and heights. — Stephen Gardiner

Really love him, I mean," Geilie persisted. "Not just to bed him; I know you want that, and he does too. They all do. But do you love him?"
Did I love him? Beyond the urges of the flesh? The hole had the dark anonymity of the confessional, and a soul on the verge of death had no time for lies.
"Yes," I said, and laid my head back on my knees.
It was silent in the hole for some time, and I hovered once more on the verge of sleep, when I heard her speak once more, as though to herself.
"So it's possible," she said thoughtfully. — Diana Gabaldon

I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God. — Igor Stravinsky

I wouldn't want to even try to begin to describe our customer, as I think she likes a certain amount of anonymity. I try to offer clothes that allow that. I myself do not like being defined so readily, so I imagine that she is similar? — Phoebe Philo

Men like that - when they know they won't be found out - they will do anything. — Michelle Paver

I have great family and friends that do not treat me like Queen Latifah. We've all grown with this thing, they have sacrificed part of there anonymity; they've had to deal with rumors and things in the paper and they've had to take this ride along with me and they've taken it and we've had a good time. — Queen Latifah

The birds of anonymity fly high above in our shared sky. Witness their beauty. — Truth Devour

Strong privacy advocates - especially those promoting encryption and anonymity - may deny that this phenomenon is a direct physical corollary of their message, so I will let the reader decide whether a philosophy that relies on cybernetic gates, walls, and coded locks is any different in its underlying basis - fear. — David Brin

What I hate is the loss of anonymity. — Harrison Ford

According to this woman, who requested anonymity because of her current job as a clinical psychologist, "He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They'd been smoking pot." — Rand Paul

If America is the land of opportunity, a country where perseverance and hard work is rewarded by recognition, then an illegal harbors the opposite ambitions. His greatest reward us anonymity, invisibility. Aided and abetted by market forces and the laws of supply and demand, he hones his skill to stand up but make sure he's never counted. — Bella Pollen

Prague might be the perfect place, after all: a city that valued anonymity, the desire to be no one and someone at once. — Matthew Salesses

There is a weird kind of anonymity a roller coaster provides: It's populated, but everyone's too preoccupied with whirling around the roof of a casino to eavesdrop. It runs a fixed amount of time, has minimal surveillance for lack of a way to descramble the audio, and it's conveniently out of earshot for certain writer- types who might scribble down the plan. — Daniel Younger

The trick to acting is not to show off; it's to think the thoughts of the character. I was lucky because when I started acting, it was doing jobs above pubs. I learned to act in anonymity, so by the time people saw me, I knew what I was doing. I was crap for years, but no one saw me being crap. It's a trade you learn. — Eddie Marsan

I know that the vitriol and hyperbole that exists online, and the anonymity, can be deadly because it's cloaked in negativity and it's brutal sometimes. — Adrian Pasdar

At the fruit of existence, there is a single concept of anonymity. This unknown concept is well known however. All one has to do is simply look behind the mirror for the answer. Yet, the answer won't come until the right question is asked. Because the illusions of reality are dressed in endless reflections, the blind will continue to be guided by the blind. The unknown concept is recognized to those who have tasted the fruit of existence, and as distant as the woman trying to grab Heaven from the reflection of an empty pond. — Lionel Suggs

Great institutions have leaders who are proud of what they do, and who engage with everyone who makes up those institutions, so each person understands their role. But our jailers are generally granted near-total anonymity, like the cartoon executioner who wears a hood to conceal his identity. What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key? How can a prisoner understand their punishment to have been worthwhile to anyone, when it's dealt in a way so offhand and indifferent? — Piper Kerman

There are so many reasons why, for me, writing is superior to acting. One of them is anonymity. Writers can live relatively normal lives. — Evangeline Lilly

Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was an immaculate anonymity. — Alice Sebold

Being in the country is like being in a dream - one doesn't quite know who one is. There is an anonymity to it all - that strange human creature that is me, one among all. — Meia Geddes

In trying to be perfect,
He perfected the art of anonymity,
Became imperceptible
And arrived nowhere from nowhere. — Dejan Stojanovic

What is the purpose of a city if not to grant the greatest of gifts, anonymity? — Rabih Alameddine

Before you were born, you were nothing more than an indistinguishable lump of unformed matter. After death, you simply will return to that nebulous state. You are going to become the raw material out of which new beings will be fashioned. Will there be pain in this natural process? No! Pleasure? No! Now, is there anything frightening in this? Certainly not! And yet, people sacrifice pleasure on earth in the hope that pain will be avoided in an after-life. The fools don't realize that, after death, pain and pleasure cannot exist: there is only the sensationless state of cosmic anonymity: therefore, the rule of life should be ... to enjoy oneself! — Marquis De Sade

I'm doing the absolute opposite of giving myself away. As far as I'm concerned, I'll be completely visible. If the painting sells, I'll be in Paris, hanging on a wall. If anything, I'm being selfish. It's perfect; all the freedom of creation, with none of the fuss. — Jessie Burton

It was nearly eight before he returned to the office. This was the hour when he found London most lovable; the working day over, her pub windows were warm and jewel-like, her streets thrummed with life, and the indefatigable permanence of her aged buildings, softened by the street lights, became strangely reassuring. We have seen plenty like you, they seemed to murmur soothingly, as he limped along Oxford Street carrying a boxed-up camp bed. Seven and a half million hearts were beating in close proximity in this heaving old city, and many, after all, would be aching far worse than his. Walking wearily past closing shops, while the heavens turned indigo above him, Strike found solace in vastness and anonymity. — Robert Galbraith

Yoga has moved from relative anonymity in the West to a well-recognized practice offered in thousands of studios, community centers, hospitals, gyms, and health clubs. — Deepak Chopra

We must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide to commit crimes. As citizens, we have a right to privacy. We have no such right to anonymity. — Edgar Bronfman Jr.

Let's begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes-indeed, deletes-the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity. — John Kenneth Galbraith

You know, very few people really want to become individuals," he says. "People claim they do, but they don't. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that's not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself. — Charles Baxter

Modernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role ... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences. — Nick Harkaway

I want to be normal. I really want anonymity. — Emma Watson

What difference does it make after all?
anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind. — Jack Kerouac

Everything in her wanted to run -fly back to California, back to her quiet existence working among strangers. Hiding out in the folds of tree trunks and tropical petals, tucked away safely among so many foreign plants and people. — Alice Sebold

It's not fair that the accused is not protected from adverse publicity whilst the accuser is guaranteed anonymity, whatever the verdict. — Jonathan King

I think that sense of always traveling has something to do with anonymity and privacy and pleasure in having a very clear, very reductive life. — Kiki Smith

The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence. — Eric Hoffer

The freedom to connect to the world anywhere at anytime brings with it the threat of unscrupulous predators and criminals who mask their activities with the anonymity the Internet provides to its users. — Mike Fitzpatrick

'Man v. Food' was the biggest career-defining opportunity. I went from anonymity to someone of note with access to amazing eateries. — Adam Richman

Writing is an act of hope. It means carving order out of chaos, of challenging one's own beliefs and assumptions, of facing the world with eyes and heart wide open. Through writing we declare a personal identity amid faceless anonymity. We find purpose and beauty and meaning even when the rational mind argues that none of these exist. Writing therefore, is also an act of courage. How much easier is it to lead an unexamined life than to confront yourself on the page? — Jack Heffron

Anonymity is the new fame. — Chuck Palahniuk

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. — Wesley Snipes

Who sent you?" Sicarius asked.
Amaranthe considered carefully before answering. If he simply meant to scare her into providing information, he could have started with a knife against her throat. No, he had almost broken her neck. He had intended to kill her but stopped mid-motion. Why? And would he continue where he had left off if she answered incorrectly?
"Commander of the Armies Hollowcrest."
Given the previous demonstration of how he could see through lies, the truth seemed a safer choice. Besides, she found herself reluctant to die to protect Hollowcrest's anonymity.
"Why?"
"To kill you."
"That I gathered. Why did he send you? What did you do to anger him?"
"I ... Uhm, what?"
"It was a suicide mission. You must have suspected. — Lindsay Buroker

the definition of immortality centered on being remembered. The "living dead" were kept from fading into anonymity by being called to life in communal story, song, and dance. Remembering, whether by written or oral means, is an act of distillation. Some memories fall away; others survive, are embellished, and become stronger with the passage of time. Stories — Milton C. Sernett

Without need for excuse or elaborate theodicies, malevolence explains the world that is, and by the strength and rigidity of this explanation an imprint - an outline - of the Creator who cherishes His anonymity is revealed. — John Zande

I've been acting for a long time, and I've done a lot of things, and I've been maintaining my anonymity pretty well. I get recognized once a week, at most, here and there, so I'm reluctant to give that up. — Denis O'Hare

I'm very much against the anonymity of bloggers and social media. I just hate it and I think it's really cowardly. — Ice-T

If a Jew is fascinated by Christians it is not because of their virtues, which he values little, but because they represent anonymity, humanity without race. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The new freedom of expression brought by the Internet goes far beyond politics. People relate to each other in new ways, posing questions about how we should respond to people when all that we know about them is what we have learned through a medium that permits all kinds of anonymity and deception. — Peter Singer

I like my anonymity - that when I meet people they don't know me. — Mia Wasikowska

There is a special blessing in old clothes, and that aside from their comfort, for which especially they are to be cherished. They confer a kind of anonymity on one who wears them gladly; all their bright places rubbed to a uniform dullness, they achieve an appearance so nearly nondescript that only a close scrutiny could learn that ever they held shape at all. — Maude Meagher

I have a place that I get to go to in the Bahamas. It's the only place that guarantees total anonymity and freedom. — Johnny Depp

I'm not a kid. You don't get in this business for anonymity. It's not like I have posters of myself on the wall, but at the same time, I'm kind of ready for a little bit of it, but I worry for my little one, and my family - their privacy. That's what I'm more protective of. — Hugh Jackman

I was trying to make the web more civil. I was trying to make it more elegant. I got rid of anonymity. I combined a thousand disparate elements into one unified system. But I didn't picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where all government and all life was channeled through one network. — Dave Eggers

Kindness is a virtue neither modern nor urban. One almost unlearns it in a city. Towns have their own beatitude; they are not unfriendly; they offer a vast and solacing anonymity or an equally vast and solacing gregariousness. But one needs a neighbor on whom to practice compassion. — Phyllis McGinley

Between a quarter and a third of Los Angeless land area is now monopolized by the automobile and its needs-by freeways, highways, garages, gas stations, car lots, parking lots. And all of it is blanketed with anonymity and foul air. — Alistair Cooke

I like the anonymity that directors can have about their films. — Frank Ocean

It's nice to have some anonymity and still be low key. — Melanie Fiona

So I try not to do press and if you can keep the balance of keeping a certain degree of anonymity and do interesting work then you can hope for a degree of career longevity. — Charlie Hunnam

I enjoy visiting building sites. Unlike the ordered anonymity of office bureaucracy or the featureless regularity of a factory assembly line, a building site appears disorderly and chaotic. In fact, there is organization, but it is a loose orchestration of many separate trademen, working side by side but not necessarily together. — Witold Rybczynski

It must be odd, being recognisable. I would hate to lose that anonymity. It happened for a while with 'Spooks.' No one notices me now. — Matthew Macfadyen

The faces of the others looked like aggregates of interchangeable features, every face oozing to blend into the anonymity of resembling all, and all looking as if they were melting. Rearden's face, with the sharp planes, the pale blue eyes, the ash-blond hair, had the firmness of ice; the uncompromising clarity of its lines made it look, among the others, as if he were moving through a fog, hit by a ray of light. — Ayn Rand

I am free, anonymous man. My flights and falls occurred while I was wearing a magical cap of of invisibility, my successes and sins sailed on in invisible corvettes, and films and books flew off into the abyss in invisible strongboxes. I am free, anonymous. — Tadeusz Konwicki

Anonymity may be a powerful drug; it is as well we do not taste too much of it in our daily lives. — Stephanie Barron

All that we see is but the reflex of a power that endures, untouched by the pain ... a transcendent anonymity regarding itself in all of the self-centered, battling egos that are born and die in time. — Joseph Campbell

It appears to me that our sex is only discussed publicly in a derogatory manner. The respectable woman is doomed to anonymity. — Karen Essex

Working alone on stories, I began to feel the anonymity of motels on interstate highways reached by jet planes and rental cars. It was hard to have a good time, and the only way I could make the loneliness excusable was by taking pictures I thought were very good, even valuable. — John Loengard

Some of us just don't want to be famous ... anonymity cannot be bought for any price, once you have lost it ... — Robyn Davidson

Anonymity became a release, the only place to which I could turn. — Asne Seierstad

In the early 2000s, people expected that anonymity on the Internet would be positive for the development of democracy in South Korea. In a Confucian culture like South Korea's, hierarchy can block the free exchange of opinions in face-to-face situations. The web offered a way around that. — Kim Young-ha

He handed Mae a piece of paper, on which he'd written, in crude all capitals, a list of assertions under the headline "The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age." Mae scanned it, catching passages: "We must all have the right to anonymity." "Not every human activity can be measured." "The ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of any endeavour is catastrophic to true understanding." "The barrier between public and private must remain unbreachable." At the end she found one line, written in red ink: "We must all have the right to disappear. — Dave Eggers

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. — Jeffrey Rosen

Although it might seem as though anonymity, invisibility, and other such distancing factors grant us the freedom to engage in more authentic forms of self-expression than we're usually permitted, [John] Suler warns against the temptation to regard disinhibition as "revealing of an underlying 'rue self." He suggests instead that the inhibited self and disinhibited self are simply different *sides* of the *same* person. So Suler challenges the intuitive notion that whatever inhibits us thereby diminishes the authenticity of our self-expression. — Mimi Marinucci

Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it. — Virginia Woolf

George Lazenby is no one's favorite James Bond, but for me the anonymity at the center of this lavish production only serves to reveal the Bond machine firing on all cylinders: superb editing and photography, incredible score, great setpieces. The most romantic in the series, and it actually has, of all things, a tragic ending. — Christopher Nolan

Losing my anonymity in this world I think is something that I find terrifying. — Alex O'Loughlin

Human beings are not meant to lose their anonymity and privacy. — Sarah Chalke

Online life is so delicious because it is socializing with almost no friction. — David Brooks

I didn't choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence. — Elena Ferrante

Anonymity was one of the major perks of the OASIS. — Ernest Cline

Cyber bullies can hide behind a mask of anonymity online, and do not need direct physical access to their victims to do unimaginable harm. — Anna Maria Chavez

Way before Watergate, senior administration officials hid behind anonymity. — Bob Woodward

Pundits, opponents, and disillusioned supporters would blame Obama for squandering the promise of his administration. Certainly he and his administration made their share of mistakes. But it is hard to think of another president who had to face the kind of guerrilla warfare waged against him almost as soon as he took office. A small number of people with massive resources orchestrated, manipulated, and exploited the economic unrest for their own purposes. They used tax-deductible donations to fund a movement to slash taxes on the rich and cut regulations on their own businesses. While they paid focus groups and seasoned operatives to frame these self-serving policies as matters of dire public interest, they hid their roles behind laws meant to protect the anonymity of philanthropists, leaving more folksy figures like Santelli to carry the message. — Jane Mayer

The fog wasn't simply the steamy vapors off the bay caught and penned in by hills, but a soft breath of anonymity that shrouded and cushioned the bashful traveler. — Maya Angelou