Quotes & Sayings About Privacy

Homo sapiens is one of the few species on earth that care if they're seen having sex. The impala is unconcerned. The dingo roundly flaunts it. A masturbating chimpanzee will stare straight at you. To any creature other than you and I and 6 billion other privacy-needing H. sapiens, sex is like peeling a mango or scratching your ear. It's just something you do sometimes. — Mary Roach

To make up a dance, I still need, as I needed then, a pot of tea, walking space, privacy and an idea. — Agnes De Mille

You can't imagine fame. You can only ever see it from an outsider and comment on it with the rueful wisdom of a non participant. When it happens to you, it doesn't matter what age or how, it is a very steep learning curve. The imprtanot thing to realize in all of it is that life is short, to protect the ones you love, and not expose yourself to too much abuse or narcissistic reflection gazing and move on. If fame affords me the type of ability to do the kind of work I'm being offered, who am I to complain about the downsides. It's all relative. And this are obviously very high class problems. The way privacy becomes an every shrinking island is inevitable but also manageable and it doesn't necessary have to get that way ... — Benedict Cumberbatch

Invade a man's privacy and then put the burden on him. — Rex Stout

Whether you're conducting phone interviews or simply need to hear yourself think, privacy is an extremely important variable in the writing life. — Sage Cohen

All the legal action I've taken against newspapers has had a massively positive effect on my life and achieved exactly what I wanted, which is privacy and non-harassment. — Sienna Miller

Privacy isn't negotiable. It's the right of every American. — Jackie Speier

History has shown that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg did, in fact, dramatically change the balance of the court in many critical areas, such as abortion, the privacy debate expansion and child pornography. — Sam Brownback

Very private people have mastered the art of telling you little about themselves but doing it in such a way you think you know a lot. — Anonymous

The bigger the network, the harder it is to leave. Many users find it too daunting to start afresh on a new site, so they quietly consent to Facebook's privacy bullying. — Evgeny Morozov

It's the interviewee's job to know that his privacy is going to be invaded on some level. Otherwise, you are better off not doing the interview. — John Travolta

I've learned the hard way how valuable privacy is. And I've learned that there are a lot of things in your life that really benefit from being private. And relationships are one of them. — Ashton Kutcher

The real Harry thought that this might just be the most bizarre thing he had ever seen, and he had seen some extremely odd things. He watched as his six doppelgangers rummaged in the sacks, pulling out sets of clothes, putting on glasses, stuffing their own things away. He felt like asking them to show a little more respect for his privacy as they all began stripping off with impunity, clearly much more at ease with displaying his body than they would have been with their own. "I knew Ginny was lying about that tattoo," said Ron, looking down at his bare chest. "Harry, your eyesight really is awful," said Hermione, as she put on glasses. — J.K. Rowling

I'm learning to accept the lack of privacy as the real downer in my profession. — Halle Berry

It's important to recognize that you can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. — Barack Obama

The way things are supposed to work is that we're supposed to know virtually everything about what they [the government] do: that's why they're called public servants. They're supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that's why we're called private individuals. — Glenn Greenwald

Secret government programs that pry into people's private affairs are bound up with ideas about secrecy and privacy that arose during the process by which the mysterious became secular. — Jill Lepore

I believe in my privacy. I always have, and I always will. I don't think that my private life needs to be on display for me to get a better response at the box office or for me to get a better choice of movies. — Kajol

In the early 1980s, I wrote a book called 'The Complete Guide to Financial Privacy.' If I would write that book today, it would be a pamphlet. There is precious little privacy left. — Mark Skousen

For a love to grow through the test of everyday living, one must respect that zone of privacy where one retires to relate to the inside instead of the outside. — Khalil Gibran

We don't stand here alone, it's possible through the great organisations that support us. The disclosures that Edward Snowden revealed aren't only a threat to privacy but to democracy, when the most important decisions made affect all of us. Thank you to Edward Snowden. I share this with Glenn Greenwald and other journalists who are exposing truth. — Laura Poitras

Why, my goodness, honey. After looking at all those pictures of seraphic and perspirationless babes for so long in the privacy of a foxhole, what is a poor doughfoot going to do when he comes home and discovers that American women are, after all, biological and given, under stress, to shiny noses? — Margaret Mitchell

Preserving that privacy between a writer and the work is important. You have to shut out all those voices that have reacted to your work. — Susan Minot

You have privacy if you retain the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself. — Dan Geer

Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten - and they're talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state. — Edward Snowden

About their wedding on a beach of Nantucket, after nearly 50 years together as a couple: "After years of being who we truly were only in the privacy of our homes or with a few friends, we were out in the world, under the sky, no longer pretending." - Norman Sunshine, co-author, Double Life — Norman Sunshine

You don't owe anybody the present other than yourself. Take time for you. Respect yourself and your privacy. Set boundaries. — Demi Lovato

Every child has a right to its own bent ... It has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it were its own father. — George Bernard Shaw

He that blows the coals in quarrels that he has nothing to do with, has no right to complain if the sparks fly in his face. - Ben Franklin — Benjamin Franklin

We believe we're moving out of the Ice Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age, the Information Age, to the participation age. You get on the Net and you do stuff. You IM (instant message), you blog, you take pictures, you publish, you podcast, you transact, you distance learn, you telemedicine. You are participating on the Internet, not just viewing stuff. We build the infrastructure that goes in the data center that facilitates the participation age. We build that big friggin' Webtone switch. It has security, directory, identity, privacy, storage, compute, the whole Web services stack. — Scott McNealy

I've a great sense of privacy. WRiters have to have an angle. If you say less than what you m ight tell your husband or your doctor, then You're 'mysterious'...Basically, I don't like the one-sided talk about myself. I don't enjoy the process of cross-examination: I find it absolutely sapping, I've been made mistrustful by being burned." -Audrey Hepburn
Audrey Hepburn, A Photographic Celebration — Suzanne Lander

If we can't preserve the privacy of our right to procreate, I can't imagine what rights we will be able to protect. — Faye Wattleton

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

I realize at one point, that I was being followed, and then I began to see the surveillance that was going past the road on my house. And so, these cars began to surveil me. People began to follow me around, and it did, it was very disrupting to think that your privacy was being violated, and for no reason that I could come up with. — Gloria Naylor

But the things is, you see, that two people can never actually become one no matter how close they are. And it would not be desirable even if it were possible. What would happen when one of them died? It would leave the other as a half a person, and that would be a dreadful thing. We must each be a whole person and therefore we each need some privacy to be alone with ourselves and our own feelings. — Mary Balogh

When oranges came in, a curious proceeding was gone through. Miss Jenkyns did not like to cut the fruit, for, as she observed, the juice all ran out nobody knew where, sucking [only I think she used some more recondite word] was in fact the only way of enjoying oranges; but then there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies; and so, after dessert, in orange season, Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty used to rise up, possess themselves each of an orange in silence, and withdraw to the privacy of their own rooms to indulge in sucking oranges. — Elizabeth Gaskell

What fun it is to generalize in the privacy of a note book. It is as I imagine waltzing on ice might be. A great delicious sweep in one direction, taking you your full strength, and then with no trouble at all, an equally delicious sweep in the opposite direction. My note book does not help me think, but it eases my crabbed heart. — Florida Scott-Maxwell

Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write. — Elena Ferrante

I've been careful to keep my life separate because it's important to me to have privacy and for my life not to be a marketing device for a movie or a TV show. I'm worth more than that. — Lisa Kudrow

I'm not that ambitious any more. I just like my privacy. I wish I really wasn't talked about at all. — Barbra Streisand

He loves me, and I reward his love by forcing on him something he hates. In the evening, after we dance, he rarely returns to the throne; he dances with others or moves from place to place through the room. The court thinks he is trying to be gracious, sharing his attention. Only I see that he moves always to the empty spot and the court always moves after him. He is like a dog trying to escape his own tail. He indulged himself in one brief moment of privacy, and almost died of it. Relius, he hates being king. — Megan Whalen Turner

That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior. — John Taylor Gatto

Nobody disappears completely anymore. The only thing that's disappeared is privacy, which is never coming back. And which is probably a good thing. Why should anything be private? No hiding, no guilt, no shame. Just a completely transparent world. — Paul Russell

I value my privacy, and if sometimes my actions seem strange or arbitrary or capricious, I do not want them challenged. — George R R Martin

Swirled tight, trussed, manic, most trusted. You love hills, swells, waves of sand, waves of water. You love traffic on bridges that might split in two. You love stairs leading to stairs leading to ice cream stands. Shards of pottery as good as a map. You love fractured control towers and the very broken Alaskan Way Viaduct. You love squat corner stores and barber-pole signs. You love the idea of privacy in a city of windows, the idea of light in a city of shadows. — Carol Guess

Privacy and pollution are similar problems. Both cause harm that is invisible and pervasive. Both result from exploitation of a resource--whether it is land, water, or information. Both suffer from difficult attribution. It is not easy to identify a single pollutant or a single piece of data that caused harm. Rather, the harm often comes from an accumulation of pollutants, or an assemblage of data. And the harm of both pollution and privacy is collective. No one person bears the burden of all pollution; all of society suffers when the air is dirty and the water undrinkable. Similarly, we all suffer when we live in fear that our data will be used against us by companies trying to exploit us or police officers sweeping us into a lineup. (212-213) — Julia Angwin

The sleeper turns his back on everyone. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I dwelt there by choice in privacy and peace. — Alan Bradley

He yearned for privacy and for solitude. After my transportation to a so-called "rest camp," I had the rare fortune to find solitude for about five minutes at a time. — Viktor E. Frankl

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. — Jean-Paul Sartre

No one seems to have noticed that a loss of a sense of shame means a loss of privacy; a loss of privacy means a loss of intimacy; and a loss of intimacy means a loss of depth. There is, in fact, no better way to produce shallow and superficial people than to let them live their lives entirely in the open, without concealment of anything. — Theodore Dalrymple

I would hate to have parents who were always looking over my shoulder, reading my diary, checking my thoughts. I would hate to be exposed. And so, perhaps, when I say I long to be a pane of glass, I am lying. I long for partial obscurity at the same time that I long for someone to know me.
It is confusing and difficult to be me.
Sometimes I I need to cry in order to release the great welling sadness I feel in my head.
For this I need privacy. I do not want anyone to see me and ask why, almost as much as I would like to be comforted.
Somehow, without ever being present, Matthew has exposed all of this, brought it wriggling to the surface like worms. They gather there now, vaguely nostalgic for the dark. — Meg Rosoff

I enjoy having my privacy and not seeing my face on the cover of everything, y'know? — Crystal Bowersox

There are times when you want your privacy, when you don't want the cameras in your face capturing your every move, every tear, every look. But I've gotten used to it. — Audrina Patridge

I'm alright," Loki assured me with a grin and stepped out into the hall, so we could have some privacy from onlookers. "What can I do for you, Princess?"
"Can I cut off your head?" I asked.
"Are you asking for my permission?" Loki tilted his head and cocked an eyebrow. "Because I'm going to have to say no to this one request, Princess."
"No, I mean, can I?" I asked. "As in, am I capable of it? Would you die if I did?"
"Of course I would die." Loki put one hand against the wall and leaned on it. "I'm not a bloody cockroach. What's all this about? What are you trying to find out? — Amanda Hocking

I believe that if you took privacy and you said, I'm willing to give up all of my privacy to be secure. So you weighted it as a zero. My own view is that encryption is a much better, much better world. And I'm not the only person that thinks that. — Tim Cook

Whether it's threats to Medicare, cuts in education spending, or Internet privacy, the ramifications got young people out to vote and should be enough to keep them involved in our political system. — Patrick Murphy

Perl doesn't have an infatuation with enforced privacy. It would prefer that you stayed out of its living room because you weren't invited, not because it has a shotgun — Larry Wall

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

Quit getting bent out of shape about changes to the privacy policy of this free service you voluntarily use. Judging by the last few photos you posted from spring break, you're not too concerned with privacy anyway. — Tyler Stanton

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. — E.A. Bucchianeri

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. — Eli Pariser

I think we live in a culture where it is really difficult to get privacy because everything is so accessible. It's very difficult to maintain your comfortable life with a sort of mystique. — FKA Twigs

Jenny Fields discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy. — John Irving

You need to establish a degree of privacy and solitude in order to write — Pamela Glass Kelly

I am absolutely opposed to a national ID card. This is a total contradiction of what a free society is all about. The purpose of government is to protect the secrecy and the privacy of all individuals, not the secrecy of government. We don't need a national ID card. — Ron Paul

Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations. She should have warned them, but her devotion cautioned against impertinence. As long as Sir was alive it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family-not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all. — Toni Morrison

Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby, in a singular mild, firm voice, replied, I would prefer not to. — Herman Melville

Most moral philosophers consciously or unconsciously assume the essential correctness of our cultural sexual code - family, monogamy, continence, the postulate of privacy, ... restriction of intercourse to the marriage bed, etcetera. Having stipulated our cultural code as a whole, they fiddle with details - even such piffle as solemnly discussing whether or not the female breast is an "obscene" sight! But mostly they debate how the human animal can be induced or forced to obey this code, blandly ignoring the high probability that the heartaches and tragedies they see all around them originate in the code itself rather than the failure to abide by the code. — Robert A. Heinlein

You want your privacy as a human being. — Peter Dinklage

There are drones flying over the air randomly that are recording everything that's happening on what we consider our private property. That type of technology has to stimulate us to think about what is it that we cherish in privacy, and how far we want to protect it and from whom. — Sonia Sotomayor

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

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

In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace. — Richard Louv

This school devours privacy, and rumors are like drops of blood in an ocean full of predators. — Stephanie Kuehn

A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world. — Sven Birkerts

I have no privacy anymore. — Felix Baumgartner

I love my privacy too, but at the end of the day, when it comes down to it with my woman, I call her a "special cloth alert." She's a rare breed and I love her and I don't ever want her to change because I think that's the balance of my relationship. — DJ Khaled

Transparency is for those who carry out public duties and exercise public power. Privacy is for everyone else. — Glenn Greenwald

He always ran away from the battle with himself. Even in his own heart's privacy, he excused himself, saying, If she hadn't said so-and-so, it would never have happened. — D.H. Lawrence

I certainly respect privacy and privacy rights. But on the other hand, the first function of government is to guarantee the security of all the people. — Phil Crane

I'm quite certain the Windows 8 team is preparing to market IE 10 - and by extension, Windows 8 - as the safe, privacy-enhancing choice, capitalizing on Google's many government woes and consumers' overall unease with the search giant's power. — John Battelle

I think Democrats are right. We fight for the American dream, for the environment, for privacy rights, a woman's right to choose, a good public education system. — Barbara Boxer

I'd like to do a song that I wrote today about our government's increasing infringement on our right to privacy, but the lyrics mysteriously disappeared from my guitar case. — Dan Piraro

What a terrible thing it would be to be the Pope! What unthinkable responsibilities to fall on your shoulders at an advanced age! No privacy. No seclusion. No sin. — Roger Ebert

If you love someone your freedom is curtailed, if you love someone you give up much of your privacy, if you love someone you are not merely one person but half of a couple, to think or behave any other way is to risk losing that love. — Laurell K. Hamilton

She had privacy, and the privilege of walking up and down the same battlements as the sentries. — John Peter Nettl

Sorry," she said. "I'm kind of hiding. Would you believe that when you're royalty, it is really difficult to find a moment of privacy?" Smirking, Kai shut the door behind him. He kept a hand behind his back as he came toward her. "Might I suggest getting yourself a hooded sweatshirt? It makes a surprisingly adequate disguise. — Marissa Meyer

In a strange way we were free. We'd reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: all of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves — Susanna Kaysen

If sexual relations between consenting adults are not part of the right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution, then American democracy is in trouble. — Coretta Scott King

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy. — Edward P. Morgan

I did not understand that she was hiding her feelings under irony, that this is usually the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded, and that their pride makes them refuse to surrender till the last moment and shrink from giving expression to their feelings before you.
to have guessed the truth from the timidity with which she had repeatedly approached her sarcasm, only bringing herself to utter it at last with an effort. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The marketplace is a wondrous institution. It harnesses the self-interest of each of us and puts it to work for the benefit of all. And it does so without intruding upon our desires, our privacy, or our freedom. It is regulation by reality, not by coercion. — Harry Browne

I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity. — Salman Rushdie

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

Our world is utterly saturated with fear. We fear being attacked by religious extremists, both foreign and domestic. We fear the loss of political rights, a loss of privacy, or a loss of freedom. We fear being injured, robbed or attacked, being judged by others, or neglected, or left unloved. — Brendan Myers

Privacy is a bourgeois fantasy. — Johannes Grenzfurthner