Privacy

Sunday, June 9, 2013 – Privacy

A career is born in public – talent in privacy. ~ Marilyn Monroe

The closing of a door can bring blessed privacy and comfort – the opening, terror. Conversely, the closing of a door can be a sad and final thing – the opening a wonderfully joyous moment. ~ Andy Rooney

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

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy. ~ Marshall McLuhan

The words that a father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world, but, as in whispering galleries, they are clearly heard at the end, and by posterity. ~ Jean Paul

So long as the laws remain such as they are today, employ some discretion: loud opinion forces us to do so; but in privacy and silence let us compensate ourselves for that cruel chastity we are obliged to display in public. ~ Marquis de Sade

There are only two occasions when Americans respect privacy, especially in Presidents. Those are prayer and fishing. ~ Herbert Hoover

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

We’ve come to expect so little from online privacy measures that public displays of concern about the matter are more or less for show. Being devastated to discover you’ve been tagged in somebody else’s photo has an air of the melodramatic about it at this point. ~ Sloane Crosley

As a social good, I think privacy is greatly overrated because privacy basically means concealment. People conceal things in order to fool other people about them. They want to appear healthier than they are, smarter, more honest and so forth. ~ Richard Posner

Isn’t privacy about keeping taboos in their place? ~ Kate Millett

When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else. ~ David Brin

I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad. ~ Larry Niven

Privacy under what circumstance? Privacy at home under what circumstances? You have more privacy if everyone’s illiterate, but you wouldn’t really call that privacy. That’s ignorance. ~ Bruce Sterling

Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents. ~ Edmund Leach

But why people need privacy? Why privacy is important? In China, every family live together, grandparents, parents, daughter, son and their relatives too. Eat together and share everything, talk about everything. Privacy make people lonely. Privacy make family fallen apart. ~ Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control – that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. ~ George Orwell, Why I Write

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. ~ Benjamin Franklin

In 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

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. ~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden

All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret. ~ Gabriel García Márquez

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship. ~ C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said ‘I want to be let alone!’ There is all the difference. ~ Greta Garbo

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

Language … has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone. ~ Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I want someone to sit beside after the day’s pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarreling and reconciliation I need privacy – to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits. ~ Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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

All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords. ~ T. S. Eliot

When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp? ~ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

There’s nothing like privacy. You know, I like people. It’s nice that they might like my books and all that… but I’m not the book, see? I’m the guy who wrote it, but I don’t want them to come up and throw roses on me or anything. I want them to let me breathe. ~ Charles Bukowski

I stared up at the sky and raised my middle finger, just in case God was watching. I don’t like being spied on. ~ Annabel Pitcher, My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece

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, The Flies

When he is cheerful – when the sun shines into his mind – then I venture to peep in, just as far as the light reaches, but no further. It is holy ground where the shadow falls! ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet in his private heart no man much respects himself. ~ Mark Twain

Every man’s memory is his private literature. ~ Aldous Huxley