Privacy Quotes

You lose your privacy, and sometimes, people don't see you as human. ~ Shawn Wayans

While privacy strengthens all our bonds, secrecy weakens and damages connection. Lerner points out that we do not usually "know the emotional costs of keeping a secret" until the truth is disclosed. Usually, secrecy involves lying. And lying is always the setting for potential betrayal and violation of trust. ~ Bell Hooks

I like to keep some privacy, be a normal person. ~ Judith R. Faulkner

The protection guaranteed by the Amendments is much broader in scope. The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And the use, as evidence in a criminal proceeding, of facts ascertained by such intrusion must be deemed a violation of the Fifth.

[Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissenting)] ~ Louis D. Brandeis

The Founder-Director purposely designed the building in a U-shape, in the interior of which is a courtyard with a central fountain, to reflect the introspective nature of a true Muslim, a universal and perfect man. These interior parts of the building are hidden from the outside in contrast to secularized buildings which face the road and are exposed to the busy traffic of secular life and are therefore without real privacy and introspective spirit. ~ Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud

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

She'd been pounding her location and thoughts into a device that would send those things to virtually any human with Internet access and yet looking over her shoulder had been a violation of privacy. ~ Stefan Bourque

I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In 'The Godfather' it was succession. In 'The Conversation' it was privacy. In 'Apocalypse' it was morality. ~ Francis Ford Coppola

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

Every player, in his secret heart, wants to manage one day. Every fan, in the privacy of his mind, already does. ~ Leonard Koppett

Jay showed up after school with a bouquet of flowers and an armful of DVDs, although Violet couldn't have cared less about either . . . he was all she wanted. She couldn't help the electric thrill of excitement she felt when he came strolling in, grinning at her foolishly as if he hadn't seen her in weeks rather than hours. He scooped her up from the couch and dropped her onto his lap as he sat down where she had been just a moment before. He was careful to arrange her ankle on a neatly stacked pile of pillows beside him.
He stubbornly refused to hide his affection for her, and if Violet hadn't known better she would have sword that he was going out of his way to make her self-conscious in her own home. Fortunately her parents were giving them some space for the time being, and they were left by themselves most of the time.
"Did you miss me?" he asked arrogantly as he gently brushed his lips over hers, not bothering to wait for an answer.
She smiled while she kissed him back, loving the topsy-turvy feeling that her stomach always got when he was so close to her. She wound her arms around his neck, forgetting that she was in the middle of the family room and not hidden away in the privacy of her bedroom.
He pulled away from her, suddenly serious. "You know, we didn't get much time alone yesterday. And I didn't get a chance to tell you . . ."
Violet was mesmerized by the thick timbre of his deep voice. She barely heard his words but rather concentrated ~ Kimberly Derting

I think we're seeing privacy diminish, not by laws ... but by young people who don't seem to value their privacy. ~ Alan Dershowitz

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

Just to set the record straight, a salary for a given on-screen performance does not include the right to invade anyone's privacy, to destroy someone's sense of self. ~ Jodie Foster

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

Fortunately, we have help from the media. I have to say this: I'm very grateful for the support and kindness that we've gotten. People have respected their privacy and in that way, I think, you know, no matter what people may feel about my husband's policies or what have you, they care about children and that's been good to see. ~ Michelle Obama

I knew from my years of writing about NSA abuses that it can be hard to generate serious concern about secret state surveillance: invasion of privacy and abuse of power can be viewed as abstractions, ones that are difficult to get people to care about viscerally. ~ Glenn Greenwald

I don't know how it is up North, of course, but down South there are times when Southern women feel a need for privacy. ~ John Lee Mahin

Like most music that affects me deeply, I would never listen to it while others were around, just as I would not pass on a book that I especially loved to another. I am embarrassed to admit this, knowing that it reveals some essential lack or selfishness in my nature, and aware that it runs contrary to the instincts of most, whose passion for something leads them to want to share it, to ignite a similar passion in others, and that without the benefit of such enthusiasm I would still be ignorant of many of the books and much of the music I love most ... But rather than an expansion, I've always felt a diminishment of my own pleasure when I've invited someone else to take part in it, a rupture in the intimacy I felt with the work, an invasion of privacy. It is worst when someone else picks up the copy of a book I've just been enthralled by and begins casually to thumb through the pages. ~ Nicole Krauss

Several possibilities came to mind.
1. She was living in a suburb of the city of Utashinai on Hokkaido.
2. She had married and changed her name to 'Ito.'
3. She kept her number unlisted to protect her privacy.
4. She had died in the spring two years earlier from a virulent influenza.
There must have been any number of possibilities beside these. ~ Haruki Murakami

You have to fight for your privacy or you lose it. ~ Eric Schmidt

It's dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy. ~ Noam Chomsky

Privacy is a vast subject. Also, remember that privacy and convenience is always a trade-off. When you open a bank account and want to borrow some money, and you want to get a very cheap loan, you'll share all details of your assets because you want them to give you a low interest rate. ~ Nandan Nilekani

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

The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When privacy is criminalized,
only criminals will have privacy. ~ Daniel Suarez

I remember an era when you could get your nose sliced off for sticking it too far into another man's business. Now you can find out anything about anyone with the click of a button. There is no privacy and no consideration, and everyone is prying into things that aren't their affair. You can probably check on the intertube and find out what color underwear I have on today. ~ Joe Hill

Two things a wise man never discloses to the public; his money and his women. ~ Habeeb Akande

Even though we don't know which companies the NSA has compromised – or by what means – knowing that they could have compromised any of them is enough to make us mistrustful of all of them. This is going to make it hard for large companies like Google and Microsoft to get back the trust they lost. Even if they succeed in limiting government surveillance. Even if they succeed in improving their own internal security. The best they'll be able to say is: "We have secured ourselves from the NSA, except for the parts that we either don't know about or can't talk about. ~ Bruce Schneier

Politicians argue for abortion largely because they do not want to spend the necessary money to feed, clothe and educate more people ... There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of higher order than the right to life. I do not share that view ... That was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside of your right to concerned. ~ Jesse Jackson

A knock interrupted my thoughts. "You okay?"
"Yeah. Can I have some freaking privacy?"
"Sorry. You've just been in there for a while; I wanted to make sure you weren't sick or anything. I'm leaving now. Also, I'm naked, so if you open the door right now, you're going to get the full show."
"Pass."
"Suit yourself. ~ Chelsea M. Cameron

What you have when everyone wears the same playclothes for all occasions, is addressed by nickname, expected to participate in Show And Tell, and bullied out of any desire form privacy, is not democracy; it is kindergarten. ~ Judith Martin

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

Perhaps its time to dumb down our "smart" life. We are being tracked, listened to, data mined, recorded, and so much more without our real knowing or understanding. When are we going to make a stand for our right to privacy? That's Tremendo Bullship! ~ Rosangel Perez

As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm. Speaking a public language of propaganda, uninfluenced by the real content of our history which we know only in a deep and guarded privacy, we are still in the throes of the paradox of the "gentleman and soldier."
However conscious it may have been, there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional. Nor do I doubt that its purpose is to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism - an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves. ~ Wendell Berry

The polite thing would be to go back inside, give you privacy when you read it. But, I'm just not that mature.'
'It's nothing. Fine.' Feeling foolish, Laurel opened the envelope.
You might think this is over, but you'd be wrong. I've taken your shoes hostage. Contact me within forty-eight hours, or the Pradas get it. ~ Nora Roberts

Encryption ... is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government ... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty. ~ Esther Dyson

It is hard to hide our genes completely. However devoted someone may be to the privacy of his genotype, others with enough curiosity and knowledge can draw conclusions from the phenotype he presents and from the traits of his relatives. ~ Philip Kitcher

I always felt that a governor surrenders a certain amount of privacy. And I came to accept that. ~ James Douglas

The free state offers what a police state denies - the privacy of the home, the dignity and peace of mind of the individual. ~ William O. Douglas

Trexler knew what he wanted, and what, in general, all men wanted; and he was glad, in a way, that it was both inexpressible and unattainable, and that it wasn't a wing. He was satisfied to remember that it was deep, formless, enduring and impossible of fulfillment, and that it made men sick, and that when you sauntered along Third Avenue and looked through the doorways into the dim saloons, you could sometimes pick out from the unregenerate ranks the ones who had not forgotten, gazing steadily into the bottoms of their glasses on the long chance that they could get another little peek at it. Trexler found himself renewed by the remembrance that what he wanted was at once great and microscopic, and that although it borrowed from the nature of large deeds and of youthful love and of old songs and early intimations, it was not any one of these things, and that it had not been isolated or pinned down, and that a man who attempted to define it in the privacy of a doctor's office would fall flat on his face. ~ E.B. White

Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs ... and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy. ~ Walter Benjamin

I'm not a natural employer. I live very privately, and we like our privacy at home. To be sitting and talking with your wife or your family and to have somebody walking around and you're ignoring them, I couldn't handle that at all. I can barely handle a cleaning lady coming in every so often. ~ Jim Carter

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

There is a sacred realm of privacy for every man and woman where he makes his choices and decisions-a realm of his own essential rights and liberties into which the law, generally speaking, must not intrude. ~ Geoffrey Fisher

When government gets between my lips and my stomach; I call that invasion of privacy! ~ Joel Salatin

In her more lucid moments, she knew that half her life had been sacrificed to safeguard her secret heart, to appease that unreasonable, mortal dread she suffered of being suddenly revealed to others in a nakedness of spirit that terrified her more than the concept of God's own retribution itself. ~ Raymond Kennedy

Is where you live. This is where you sleep. This is where you feel the most privacy in your whole entire life. This is more than just a room. ~ Colleen Hoover

( ... ) perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's brain. ~ Terry Pratchett

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

Can we discuss this after the wedding?"
"No."
Damn. It was worth a shot.
"Fine." I glanced around the car. How does one ask for privacy in the back of a limo occupied by eight observers? To their credit, my friends did their best impression of quality assurance engineers, checking the seat cushions for stitch durability and picking lint from the carpet. ~ Penny Reid

Privacy,is what you shut your mouth about,Denial is what you shut your eyes against. ~ Karin Lowachee

I just want people to respect the privacy of my relatives in Taiwan ... They need to live their lives as well. ~ Jeremy Lin

Let me tell you something, Johnny. And don't you ever forget this. Men make their own puny little laws for the courts. Men bend those laws, break them, change them, corrupt them, turn them to their own use. But there are other laws. Basic laws. And the strongest law of all is survival. When your honor, your family, your home, your privacy, are threatened, you have to think of how you'll answer to your God. And to hell with men's chickenshit little laws. ~ Leonard Sanders

See, I always forget this about you," he says, and even now, long after we first lost our privacy, I can't help wondering who's overhearing him. "Every decade, you like to pin me to the ground, pull open my mouth, and take a sh** right into it. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

What exactly did having needs mean, while he was on the subject? That Delaney needed to have sex? that she craved an orgasm? And if that were the case, why couldn't she just take care of the matter on her won in the privacy of her home without putting him through all this torture? Anything was preferable to the thought of her being with Jake. ~ Sarah Mayberry

I showed that privacy was an implicit right in Jewish law, probably going back to the second or third century, when it was elaborated on in a legal way. ~ Norman Lamm

People who say, "it is not my fault," continuously fail. People who say, "I've done no wrong," have not done enough right. People who say, "I am done!" are never done repeating the cycle. Even in the privacy of our own thoughts, we can't sow lies and reap truth. ~ Katina Ferguson

Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors. ~ Siri Hustvedt

It is hard to violate somebody's privacy if the person is completely anonymous. ~ Dana Milbank

The Supreme Court must strike down the government's illegal spying program as a violation of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy. ~ Rand Paul

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

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

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

We live in a moment in history in which our privacy may not be important. ~ Jonathan Nolan

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

I wouldn't like to be that famous, I value my privacy. Mind you, Miss Piggy enjoys every moment of it. If it were not for me, she would spend all her time in the limelight. ~ Frank Oz

This communal parenting brought me out of the privacy of our foreign enclave and into the public life of the community. Here, parenting was everyone's responsibility; all adults were "aunties" and "uncles". ~ Aminta Arrington

Those who are experts in the fields of surveillance, privacy, and technology say that there need to be two tracks: a policy track and a technology track. The technology track is encryption. It works and if you want privacy, then you should use it. ~ Laura Poitras

This is a free country, madam. We have a right to share your privacy in a public place. ~ Peter Ustinov

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

There is no such thing as privacy between a deity and his worshipper. There are no secrets, no glossed-over failures. Only promises kept and abandoned, sins committed and imagined, and raw emotion. How many of us are ready to have our lives judged? What would happen if we were found wanting? ~ Ilona Andrews

Dear 2600: I think my girlfriend has been cheating on me and I wanted to know if I could get her password to Hotmail and AOL. I am so desperate to find out. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
And this is yet another popular category of letter we get. You say any help would be appreciated? Let's find out if thats true. Do you think someone who is cheating on you might also be capable of having a mailbox you don't know about? Do you think that even if you could get into the mailbox she uses that she would be discussing her deception there, especially if we live in a world where Hotmail and AOL passwords are so easily obtained? Finally, would you feel better if you invaded her privacy and found out that she was being totally honest with you? Whatever problems are going on in this relationship are not going to be solved with subterfuge. If you can't communicate openly, there's not much there to salvage. ~ Emmanuel Goldstein

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

He's rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earphones to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes. Occasionally he'll hand the device to Mindy, wanting her opinion, and each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums - hers alone - is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were looking back on this lark in Africa with Lou from some distant future. ~ Jennifer Egan

For excellence, the presence of others is always required. ~ Hannah Arendt

The Fremen! They're paying the Guild for privacy, paying in a coin that's freely available to anyone with desert power - spice. ~ Frank Herbert

Most Americans want a sense of privacy. A lot of us don't realize how much of our privacy we're exposing by the internet. ~ Patrick Leahy

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 people enjoy my profile from the privacy of their own home, that's entirely up to you. ~ Peter Capaldi

The public good must come before private interests. ~ Bryant McGill

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

Being very famous is not the fun it sounds. It merely means you're being chased by a lot of people and you lose your privacy. ~ Colin Wilson

Taking somebody's money without permission is stealing, unless you work for the IRS; then it's taxation. Killing people en masse is homicidal mania, unless you work for the Army; then it's National Defense. Spying on your neighbors is invasion of privacy, unless you work for the FBI; then it's National Security. Running a whorehouse makes you a pimp and poisoning people makes you a murderer, unless you work for the CIA; then it's counter-intelligence. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy. ~ Phil Zimmermann

She was like a permanent invasion of one's privacy. ~ Aldous Huxley

There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public. ~ Philip K. Dick

In order to have greater visibility of the larger cyber threat landscape, we must remove the government bureaucratic stovepipes that inhibit our abilities to effectively defend America while ensuring citizens' privacy and civil liberties are also protected. ~ Michael McCaul

Having to explain to a child of today, who has learned to swipe before they can speak, that certain aspects of a person's life must remain private for the preservation of one's sanity is almost frivolous. ~ Aysha Taryam

A memoir is an invitation into another person's privacy. ~ Isabel Allende

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents. ~ James Madison

No matter how reclusive we tend to be, we picture the after-life as a community of souls. It is one thing to seek privacy in this life; it is another to face eternity alone. ~ Robert Breault

You use your money to buy privacy because during most of your life you aren't allowed to be normal. ~ Johnny Depp

The trouble is that privacy is at once essential to, and in tension with, both freedom and security. A cabinet minister who keeps his mistress in satin sheets at the French taxpayer's expense cannot justly object when the press exposes his misuse of public funds. Our freedom to scrutinise the conduct of public figures trumps that minister's claim to privacy. The question is: where and how do we draw the line between a genuine public interest and that which is merely what interests the public? ~ Timothy Garton Ash

I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building. ~ Edward Snowden

Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I guess you need your privacy if you've got the Tinder Train rolling in every night. ~ R.S. Grey

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

My biggest thing has always been privacy. With an interview such as this where the questions are about me, I struggle to express myself. I have an immediate answer in my head of what I'd say, but sometimes I feel that it would be too honest. So these wheels of censorship start going around my head. ~ Garrett Hedlund

When a man modifies or adorns a woman's name, or dispatches an endearment into her vicinity, he is attempting at once to alter and deny her, to dilute the privacy of the category she has inherited and to require that she respond as someone quite less than herself. ~ Ben Marcus