Personal Privacy Quotes & Sayings

After a search of everyone's personal items (hey, if they wanted privacy, they shouldn't have abandoned me on Mars with their stuff) — Andy Weir

I spent a lot of time alone as a kid. I've never been an easy hugger. The social conventions that keep human beings separate and discrete - boundaries, etiquette, privacy, personal space - have always been a great well of safety to me. I am a rule follower. I like choosing whom I let in close. The emotional state of emergency following a death necessarily breaks those conventions down, and, unfortunately, I am bad at being human without them. I — Lindy West

When I was young, I was all about personal sovereignty and that junk, because there was no privacy and the available ideologies were collective, both socialism/communism and nationalism. — Aleksandar Hemon

In decision after decision on the bench, Judge [Samuel] Alito has excused abusive actions by the authorities that intrude on the personal privacy and freedoms of average Americans. — Edward Kennedy

When one has children one has no privacy. They take it for granted that what is yours is theirs, personal things and the secrets of your heart, as well as possessions. — Ruth Rendell

We want to be sensitive to people's concerns about privacy about their personal being and things, while ensuring that everybody on every flight has been properly screened. — John Pistole

Having the right to choose determines whether women will find an equal place at life's table, whether children will be truly valued, and whether everyone's personal liberties, privacy, and bodily integrity will be safeguarded against the ideology of the right. — Gloria Feldt

The Lassans were insatiably inquisitive, and the concept of privacy was almost unknown to them. A Please Do Not Disturb sign was often regarded as a personal challenge, which led to interesting complications ... — Arthur C. Clarke

I have a passionate desire for personal privacy. I want to stand before the world, for good or bad, on the book I wrote, not on what I say in letters to friends, not on my husband and my home life, the way I dress, my likes and dislikes, et cetera. My book belongs to anyone who has the price, but nothing of me belongs to the public. — Margaret Mitchell

The American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety and security. — Louis Freeh

Apparently, the glasses didn't need to be connected to the internet for the wearer to poke into someone's personal life. Even though a search engine could lead to an individual's address, the browser couldn't actually physically take you there. What had this inventor done? Did he have any idea? — Chess Desalls

I feel like the quality of privacy and respect of people's personal space has been completely disintegrated. You can ask to take the picture. I will be so glad to take the picture and pose and look good for the picture. — Busta Rhymes

If you were writing a book to be published, you might be restrained by the fear that your wild imaginings might drive some people crazy. As it is, you are free, you can go off in any direction whatsoever, so long as the flame in your mind burns that way. — Ted Hughes

If I were a dictator, religion and state would be separate. I swear by my religion. I will die for it. But it is my personal affair. The state has nothing to do with it. The state would look after your secular welfare, health, communications, foreign relations, currency and so on, but not your or my religion. That is everybody's personal concern! — Mahatma Gandhi

There is also the issue of personal privacy when it comes the executive power. Throughout our nation's history, whether it was habeas corpus during the Civil War, Alien and Sedition Acts in World War I, or Japanese internment camps in World War II, presidents have gone too far. — Dick Durbin

I had to focus on some personal areas in my life with the little bit of privacy that I have. — Mario Vazquez

Personal privacy is a closely held American value. — Anna Eshoo

During the campaign of 2016, we took a step toward totalitarianism without even noticing by accepting as normal the violation of electronic privacy. Whether it is done by American or Russian intelligence agencies, or for that matter by any institution, the theft, discussion, or publication of personal communications destroys a basic foundation of our rights. If we have no control over who reads what and when, we have no ability to act in the present or plan for the future. Whoever can pierce your privacy can humiliate you and disrupt your relationships at will. — Timothy Snyder

The right to personal privacy is precious. Without it, we are all potential victims for a prying secret police. — Lewis B. Smedes

An aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general. — Stefan Kanfer

Diana and I had a very good relationship with no personal problems. The only problem we did have was with the media, and the only place we could have any real privacy was at Kensington Palace, as they could not get to us there. — Hasnat Khan

How many of you have broken no laws this month? That's the kind of society I want to build. I want a guarantee - with physics and mathematics, not with laws - that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications. — John Gilmore

Every life-threatening and health-endangering crime leaves its mark, but rape, the most brutal personal invasion, the violation of privacy and freedom at every level, reducing its victim to a lump of warm flesh into which someone can thrust his dick, was like being branded with burning metal. Continuously. The echo of the event kept coming back to the victim, not just once in a while, not now and then, but nonstop. Someone — Zygmunt Miloszewski

I have a very good sense of tone, and it's possible to talk about very personal things and maintain a level of dignity and even privacy - to go to the place, to talk about it, but not get icky. — Jane Pauley

I don't like to share my personal life ... it wouldn't be personal if I shared it. — George Clooney

From Privacy to Belonging Some people want to be anonymous, but others are willing to give up some personal information in exchange for the recognition and benefits that come from belonging. There is an ongoing and probably endless debate over the complex concept of privacy. How much private data do you want to share? And with whom? How much should you have to share in exchange for the privileges of membership? One challenge many people face is the desire to access an organization's benefits while wanting to stay independent. Some want to be protected from Big Brother, while others want to avoid superfluous social interactions. Still others are unabashed joiners and simply want to connect. — Robbie Kellman Baxter

So no one cares - and that protects your personal privacy. At least most of the time no one cares. I'm not making the argument that if we're doing nothing wrong, then we shouldn't be afraid of the government monitoring us. That's a stupid, bad argument. We should always be afraid of any government monitoring us. The fact that no one cares what we're talking about is an argument for keeping it that way. We don't want the government to be able to care. Any power you give the government, the government will abuse. George Washington almost said that. — Penn Jillette

The violence in New York feels really mundane and banal to me. Whereas in the privacy of one's own home, say, like the farm I grew up on in Vermont, the kinds of things that can happen seem much more extreme. Maybe because it's more personal. Or maybe because you block out the things that happen in the city. But it's like seeing things born, live, die, fall apart, and start over again, without any intermediary clean-up steps from some corporate organization. — Elizabeth Neel

[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. — Christopher Hitchens

Confidentiality refers to the boundaries surrounding shared secrets and to the process of guarding these boundaries. While confidentiality protects much that is not in fact secret, personal secrets lie at its core. The innermost, the vulnerable, often the shameful: these aspects of self-disclosure help explain why one name for professional confidentiality has been "the professional secret." Such secrecy is sometimes mistakenly confused with privacy; yet it can concern many matters in no way private, but that someone wishes to keep from the knowledge of third parties. — Sissela Bok

Goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance. — George Eliot

I had started keeping a journal, and I was discovering that I didn't need school in order to experience the misery of appearances. I could manufacture excruciating embarrassment in the privacy of my bedroom, simply by reading what I'd written in the journal the day before. Its pages faithfully mirrored my fraudulence and pomposity and immaturity. Reading it made me desperate to change myself, to sound less idiotic. As George Benson had stressed in Then Joy Breaks Through, the experience of growth and self-realization, even of ecstatic joy, were natural processes available to believers and nonbelievers alike. And so I declared private war on stagnation and committed myself privately to personal growth. The Authentic Relationship I wanted now was with the written page. — Jonathan Franzen

No one wants their personal emails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy. — Hillary Clinton

With existing technology, we can enforce airport security without sacrificing our personal privacy. — Tom Udall

It can feel like an invasion of privacy, involving an employer in a personal matter. — Frank Murphy

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 frequency of personal questions grows in direct proportion to your increasing girth ... No one would ask a man such a personally invasive question as "Is your wife having natural childbirth or is she planning to be knocked out?" But someone might ask that of you. No matter how much you wish for privacy, your pregnancy is a public event to which everyone feels invited. — Jean Marzollo

The Library is an open sanctuary. It is devoted to individual intellectual inquiry and contemplation. Its function is to provide free access to ideas and information. It is a haven of privacy, a source of both cultural and intellectual sustenance for the individual reader. Since it is thus committed to free and open inquiry on a personal basis, the Library must remain open, with access to it always guaranteed. — Robert G. Vosper

If any one will here contend that there must have been traits of goodness in old Featherstone, I will not presume to deny this; but I must observe that goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much privacy, elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance. In — George Eliot

For celebrities, privacy is utterly nonexistent. You are asked intrusive questions about your personal life. You can be photographed at any moment. — Roxane Gay

I like my privacy, and my personal bank manager is one of my favourite people. — Amanda Eliasch

It's the same thing in a way with privacy. You can say "I'm not doing anything wrong, therefore this doesn't concern me," but what does it mean about our society if we're all being watched and recorded? The personal experience - negotiating this as individuals - doesn't describe the social reality and the broader social costs. — Astra Taylor

The U.S. Department of Education changed the education privacy regulations in at least two crucial ways. Firstly, it increased the number of players that could have access to your child's centralized personal data to include, not just your child's teachers, but any organization or group tangentially involved in your child's education. This can include testing, technology, textbook, and research companies, just to name a few examples. Secondly, it no longer requires parent notification or permission when it shares your child's personal data with these chosen groups or companies. — Brad McQueen

1973 Fair Information Practices:
- You should know who has your personal data, what data they have, and how it is used.
- You should be able to prevent information collected about you for one purpose from being used for others.
- You should be able to correct inaccurate information about you.
- Your data should be secure.
..while it's illegal to use Brad Pitt's image to sell a watch without his permission, Facebook is free to use your name to sell one to your friends. — Eli Pariser

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

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 — Kilroy J. Oldster

And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilised man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected. — Anton Chekhov

The undeniable paradox of human existence is that a person seeks closeness with other people while protecting his or her sanctified right of privacy. Each person must carefully guard their personal identity in order to give their life a unique purposefulness. Loving other people and nature is not mutually exclusive of a person maintaining independence of thought and action. A person need not surrender his or her own pursuit of personal excellence when maintaining a respectful and reciprocal relationship with a life mate. — Kilroy J. Oldster

It's very counterintuitive to boil down something so personal, something that requires privacy. All of a sudden, you open it up to the world and put it in a context where you could easily trivialize what you've done. If people sense that discomfort, they're not wrong. — Kristen Stewart

[A new all-encompassing national identification system] contradicts some of our most sacrosanct American principles of personal liberty and expectations of privacy and is far in excess of what is needed to provide us with the security and protections we all want. — Bill McCollum

I value my privacy and my personal life - and I certainly don't exploit my personal life. — Scarlett Johansson

The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. — Joan Didion

It takes a cat to heal a woman's wounded heart." I say this knowing it takes a full range of other factors to resolve emotional damage issues and restore personal equilibrium. I've had a heaping share of therapy, familial support, friendships and rescue. What I craved now, however, was the privacy, closeness, and unconditional love of a cat to bring my healing process full cycle. I needed CiCi. — EsthersChild

I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself. — John Le Carre

One hundred years ago, everyone could have personal privacy. You and your friend could walk into an empty field, look around to see that no one else was nearby, and have a level of privacy that has forever been lost. As Whitfield Diffie has said: No right of private conversation was enumerated in the Constitution. I don't suppose it occurred to anyone at the time that it could be prevented — Bruce Schneier

When a young non-white male is stopped and searched at the whim of a police officer, his idea of personal space, privacy and self esteem are shattered, to say nothing of his Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment protections. The damage goes deep quickly and stays. Stop & frisk, as well as a tactic, is also an incitement. — Henry Rollins

In some of our subcultures, paper bags are often used to carry intimate personal belongings. And the sight of some of our less fortunate citizens carrying their belongings in brown paper bags is too familiar to permit such crass biases to diminish protection of privacy. — David L. Bazelon

If it wasn't for this person's privacy, I'd be able to talk pretty freely about this subject on a personal level. The record's about not her. It's about my struggles through years of dealing with the aftermath of lost love and longing and just mediocrity and just bad news, like life stuff. And in the [record], where the title comes from, the lyrics are actually a conversation between me and another girl, not this Emma character. — Justin Vernon

To be true to its constitutional role, the Supreme Court should refuse to be drawn into making public policy, and it should strike down legislation only when a clear constitutional violation exists. When judicial activists resort to various inventions and theories to impose their personal views on privacy and liberty, they jeopardize the legitimacy of the judiciary as an institution and undermine the role of the other branches of government. — Mark Levin