100 Quotes About Privacy

The right to privacy is a cornerstone of any free society. When people are not allowed to express themselves freely, they are robbed of their most fundamental and inalienable right: the ability to speak and think freely. These privacy quotes can help remind us of this important right and encourage us to stand up for it in the face of oppression and censorship.

All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.
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All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret. Unknown
If after I die, people want to write my biography,...
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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
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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
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A desire for privacy does not imply shameful secrets; Moglen argues, again and again, that without anonymity in discourse, free speech is impossible, and hence also democracy. The right to speak the truth to power does not shield the speaker from the consequences of doing so; only comparable power or anonymity can do that. Nick Harkaway
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Intellectual property, more than ever, is a line drawn around information, which asserts that despite having been set loose in the world - and having, inevitably, been created out of an individual's relationship with the world - that information retains some connection with its author that allows that person some control over how it is replicated and used. In other words, the claim that lies beneath the notion of intellectual property is similar or identical to the one that underpins notions of privacy. It seems to me that the two are inseparable, because they are fundamentally aspects of the same issue, the need we have to be able to do something by convention that is impossible by force: the need to ringfence certain information. I believe that the most important unexamined notion - for policymakers and agitators both - in these debates is that they are one: you can't persuade people on the one hand to abandon intellectual property (a decision which, incidentally, would mean an even more massive upheaval in the way the world runs than we've seen so far since 1990) and hope to keep them interested in privacy. You can't trash privacy and hope to retain a sense of respect for IP. Nick Harkaway
I stared up at the sky and raised my middle...
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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
Always remember that you were once alone, and the crowd...
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Always remember that you were once alone, and the crowd you see in your life today are just as unecessary as when you were alone. Michael Bassey Johnson
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Listen, Harriet. I do unterstand. I know you don't want either to give or to take. . You don't want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person."" That's true. That's the truest thing you ever said."" All right. I can respect that. Only you've got to play the game. Don't force an emotional situation and then blame me for it."" But I don't want any situation. I want to be left in peace. Dorothy L. Sayers
There is a certain delightful sort of hope which the...
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There is a certain delightful sort of hope which the introvert can receive only by having company over...the hope that they will leave soon. Criss Jami
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Blindness is a private matter between a person and the eyes with which he or she was born. Unknown
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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
We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude,...
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We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship. C.s. Lewis
Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.
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Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too. Stephen King
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I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling 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
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People that say they have nothing to hide, can’t be trusted with your secrets. Unknown
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a...
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They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Benjamin Franklin
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Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understan Louis D. Brandeis
The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning...
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The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all fre William O. Douglas
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No, solitude did not trouble her. She could spend long minutes gazing out the window, hours listening to the BBC on the public radio station. She relished the very texture of her privacy, its depth of space and freedom, much of an entire day hers alone. Daphne Kalotay
When privacy is criminalized, only criminals will have privacy.
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When privacy is criminalized, only criminals will have privacy. Daniel Suarez
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Privacy’ is an unusable term. We should instead talk about freedom, autonomy and self-determination of the individual. Being allowed to be yourself, to think whatever you want and to act within the law with no hindrance. That resonates with everyone. Unknown
Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena...
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Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public Robert Hughes
Women have become trained to be lone soldiers online, knowing...
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Women have become trained to be lone soldiers online, knowing that to send up a signal flare for help is more likely to attract enemies than allies. Violet Blue
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No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women. Milan Kundera
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If we can't have world peace, I'll settle for a quiet room. Joyce Rachelle
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Transparency means to dedicate our thoughts and efforts to non privacy rules and not to defend negative intelligence ideas or surveillance programs. Auliq Ice
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The most reliable topic for small talk is the goings-on of stars whether they’re rising or falling, and whether nor not a particular story is truth or fiction. This is way out of balance. It invades the privacy of men and women who didn’t give up being human when they became famous, and it negates the meaning inherent in our own lives. (300) Victoria Moran
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...because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace. Salman Rushdie
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Marriage is the ultimate solitude with minimal privacy. Nelson Rodrigues
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In the kingdom of glass everything is transparent, and there is no place to hide a dark heart. Vera Nazarian
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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
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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
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There is no transparency, Marus. It can’t exist. Surveillance doesn’t go both ways. There are those who watch, and those who are watched; the powerful, and the powerless. Celeste Chaney
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[L]ike poems, cruising carves privacy out of public spaces. Poems are a kind of private communication that occurs in public speech. And I think cruising is that too: a training in reading occult codes; a way of seeing a significance in the world that most people don’t see. Garth Greenwell
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When you fake emotion for a living, when you make your money providing fantasies for other people, tuning into their worlds and indulging them, you don’t invite someone into your world very easily. Sara Sheridan
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Either a municipal bog is a private place or it isn't. If it is a private place in which to shit, how is it not a private place in which to fellate? Stephen Fry
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Clothes falling away signals a situation that I'll likely avoid putting into words. If clothes don't dress it up, don't expect talk to, either. Carrie Fisher
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That hedge provides almost complete privacy from cars and pedestrians, and I would bet he and his wife do it more than the national average. Cassandra Danz
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As with all new inventions, there are upsides and downsides. The commercial drone is no exception. But until robust safeguards have been introduced to protect personal privacy from prying eyes in the skies, the true benefits to society of unmanned aerial vehicles will remain unrealised. Alex Morritt
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I wouldn't live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn't want it next door. I'm not too happy it's within ten miles. Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. Because their beautiful thinking ignores both history and human nature. Because they'd spoil my thing with their thing. Because I don't think any of them is wise enough to play God and create a human society. Look. I like privacy, I don't like crowds, I don't like noise, I don't like anarchy, I don't even like discussion all that much. I prefer study, which is very different from meditation-not better, different. I don't like children who are part of the wild life. So are polecats and rats and other sorts of hostile and untrained vermin. I want to make a distinction between civilization and the wild life. I want a society that will protect the wild life without confusing itself with it. Wallace Stegner
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Father Brendan Flynn: "A woman was gossiping with her friend about a man whom they hardly knew - I know none of you have ever done this. That night, she had a dream: a great hand appeared over her and pointed down on her. She was immediately seized with an overwhelming sense of guilt. The next day she went to confession. She got the old parish priest, Father O' Rourke, and she told him the whole thing. 'Is gossiping a sin?' she asked the old man. 'Was that God All Mighty's hand pointing down at me? Should I ask for your absolution? Father, have I done something wrong?' 'Yes, ' Father O' Rourke answered her. 'Yes, you ignorant, badly-brought-up female. You have blamed false witness on your neighbor. You played fast and loose with his reputation, and you should be heartily ashamed.' So, the woman said she was sorry, and asked for forgiveness. 'Not so fast, ' says O' Rourke. 'I want you to go home, take a pillow upon your roof, cut it open with a knife, and return here to me.' So, the woman went home: took a pillow off her bed, a knife from the drawer, went up the fire escape to her roof, and stabbed the pillow. Then she went back to the old parish priest as instructed. 'Did you gut the pillow with a knife?' he says. 'Yes, Father.' 'And what were the results?' 'Feathers, ' she said. 'Feathers?' he repeated. 'Feathers; everywhere, Father.' 'Now I want you to go back and gather up every last feather that flew out onto the wind, ' 'Well, ' she said, 'it can't be done. I don't know where they went. The wind took them all over.' 'And that, ' said Father O' Rourke, 'is gossip!. John Patrick Shanley
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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
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…if a thing can be said to be, to exist, then such is the nature of these expansive times that this thing which is must suffer to be touched. Ours is a time of connection; the private, and we must accept this, and it’s a hard thing to accept, the private is gone. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted. And if you’re thinking how awful these sentiments are, you are perfectly correct, these are awful times, but you must remember as well that this has always been the chiefest characteristic of the Present, to everyone living through it; always, throughout history, and so far as I can see for all the days and years to come until the sun and the stars fall down and the clocks have all ground themselves to expiry and the future has long long shaded away into Time Immemorial: the Present is always an awful place to be. Tony Kushner
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Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write. Elena Ferrante
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Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be. Albert Camus
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The place suggested a convent with the modern improvements–an asylum in which privacy, though unbroken, might be not quite identical with privation, and meditation, though monotonous, might be of a cheerful cast. Henry James
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Friends I would like to challenge you to do an experiment, in the privacy of your studies. Everywhere you see the name “Jesus” in the Bible, replace it with the word light and see what that does to you. Sunday Adelaja
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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
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We are living in a generation where people ‘in love’ are free to touch each other’s private parts but are not allowed to touch each other’s phones because they are private. Robert Mugabe
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Always be lenient with people and keep their privacy, as they can share their problems with you. These steps can help you in making your relationship strong. Faisal Nawaz Maitlo
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You think knowing things will solve your private little griefs? Kiana Davenport
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What people dont know about you people create. Imagination is a part of being human. They fill in the unknowns with assumptions and not facts. Every man and woman is a mystery unrevealed. R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)
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It’s not the public opinion of what you are that matters, but the private personality of who you are! Israelmore Ayivor
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I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Gaston Bachelard
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If I don't talk about it, it's either very displeasing or very precious to me. Joyce Rachelle
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Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen des loix toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie.( There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.) Michel De Montaigne
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But there are other words for privacy and independence. They are isolation and loneliness. Megan Whalen Turner
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Within perfect walls there is nothing worth protecting. There is, in fact, nothing. And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. Max Barry
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So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings. Elizabeth Goudge
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I have noticed that the solar radiation reflections from rippled privacy windows cause greatly accelerated growth patterns in plants Steven Magee
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The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize. Evgeny Morozov
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The sounds of silence are a dim recollection now, like mystery, privacy and paying attention to one thing – or one person – at a time. Maureen Dowd
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[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
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I simply decided once and for all to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety and the urge to be a part of that circle of successful people, those who believe they have won who-knows-what Elena Ferrante
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I’ve been accused of being cold, snobbish, distant. Those who know me well know that I’m nothing of the sort. If anything, the opposite is true. But is it too much to ask to want to protect your private life, your inner feelings? Grace Kelly
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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. JeanPaul Sartre
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Or was Chris thinking, as I was, that if we went tothe police and told our story, our faces would be splashed on the frontpages of every newspaper in the country? Would the glare of publicitymake up for what we'd lose? Our privacy-our need to stay together? Could we lose each other just to get even? V.C. Andrews
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The truth is like sunlight: It causes cancer. J. Richard Singleton
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When to others it's not lying. It's privacy. Brian Spellman
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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
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I knelt and locked the door. I locked the door locking the world and time outside. I stretched my body across the mattress and Saskia drew in close to me and placed her open hand on my chest, her mouth near my shoulder; her breath, my breath blew out the candle, and I held my lost Wanderess with tenderness until sweet sleep overcame us. Roman Payne
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Mr. de Pinto, the dog who protects sheep quickly learns how to direct them, and it becomes a habit. The people have been trained by their 'watchmen' to jump, and to trample what the 'watchmen' want trampled." I have found, that those who would guard the people are their governors. The government admits that it is a government. The press pretends that it is not. But what a pretense! You orchestrate entire populations. And who elected you? No one. You are self-appointed, you speak for no one, and therefore you have no right to question me as if you represent the common good. Mark Helprin
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Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publications, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. The purchase of a book or pamphlet today may result in a subpoena tomorrow. Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. When the light of publicity may reach any student, any teacher, inquiry will be discouraged. The books and pamphlets that are critical of the administration, that preach an unpopular policy in domestic or foreign affairs, that are in disrepute in the orthodox school of thought will be suspect and subject to investigation. The press and its readers will pay a heavy price in harassment. But that will be minor in comparison with the menace of the shadow which government will cast over literature that does not follow the dominant party line. If the lady from Toledo can be required to disclose what she read yesterday and what she will read tomorrow, fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes of the land. Through the harassment of hearings, investigations, reports, and subpoenas government will hold a club over speech and over the p . William O. Douglas
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These examples and many others demonstrate an alarming trend whereby the privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man's life at . William O. Douglas
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We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from govern William O. Douglas
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This place does not feel like my country. It feels like countries I have read about where things are very bad. It feels, in fact, like exactly the kind of thing we were protesting against, but we thought it was elsewhere. It is not heartening to find that it has come to us. Nick Harkaway
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Yet the possibility of information storage, beyond what men and governments ever had before, can make available at the touch of a button a man's total history (including remarks put on his record by his kindergarten teacher about his ability and character). And with the computer must be placed the modern scientific technical capability which exists for wholesale monitoring of telephone, cable, Telex and microwave transmissions which carry much of today's spoken and written communications. The combined use of the technical capability of listening in on all these forms of communications with the high-speed computer literally leaves no place to hide and little room for privacy. Francis A. Schaeffer
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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
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The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization. These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there. While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy. Julian Assange
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If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve. David Sedaris
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I have not encouraged talk about man’s holy privacy, although I do respect and defend man’s right to have it. Mie Hansson
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The missing link between humans and apes? It's certainly those brutes who haven't yet learned to respect privacy. Raheel Farooq
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God waits for our permission and doesn’t invade our privacy as we do with others. Everybody has free choice. Mabel Katz
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The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual. Earl Warren
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[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public. Clay Shirky
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All of a sudden, we've lost a lot of control. We can't turn off our internet; we can't turn off our smartphones; we can't turn off our computers. You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it's no Steve Wozniak
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The privacy of pride. Guy Gavriel Kay
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A professional man of letters, especially if he is much at war with unscrupulous enenemies, is naturally jealous of his privacy... so it was, I think, with Dryden. Walter Raleigh
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Saying of the ProphetPrivacyWhoever invades people´s privacy corrupts them. Idries Shah
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The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door. G.k. Chesterton
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In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test. Christopher Hitchens
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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
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For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that – either now or in the uncertain future – patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and record . Bruce Schneier
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[T]here is both an intrinsic and instrumental value to privacy. Intrinsically, privacy is precious to the extent that it is a component of a liberty. Part of citizenship in a free society is the expectation that one's personal affairs and physical person are inviolable so long as one remains within the law. A robust concept of freedom includes the freedom from constant and intrusive government surveillance of one's life. From this perspective, Fourth Amendment violations are objectionable for the simple fact that the government is doing something it has no licence to do—that is, invading the privacy of a law-abiding citizen by monitoring her daily activities and laying hands on her person without any evidence of wrongdoing. Privacy is also instrumental in nature. This aspect of the right highlights the pernicious effects, rather than the inherent illegitimacy, of intrusive, suspicionless surveillance. For example, encroachments on individual privacy undermine democratic institutions by chilling free speech. When citizens—especially those espousing unpopular viewpoints—are aware that the intimate details of their personal lives are pervasively monitored by government, or even that they could be singled out for discriminatory treatment by government officials as a result of their First Amendment expressive activities, they are less likely to freely express their dissident views. John W. Whitehead
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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
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I know people who are embarrassed to be American. They don't like showing their passports. It's becoming a scary place. It takes someone very brave not to be quiet, someone who doesn't mind death threats, their life being turned upside down, news cameras outside their door. There is no freedom of speech in America anymore. They are not living up to the constitution. There's so much fear in America and control. . Gillian Anderson
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I have to be alone very often. I'd be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That's how I re Audrey Hepburn
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I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. Henry David Thoreau
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Solitude sometimes is best society. John Milton
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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world. Anthony Burgess