Quotes About Privacy

There's been spying for years, there's been surveillance for years, and so forth, I'm not going to pass judgement on that, it's the nature of our society.

The first internal relation that is essential to a secret society is the reciprocal confidence of its members.

There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball where everyone hides his real character, then reveals it by hiding

Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.

I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things.

Secret courts making secret rulings on secret laws, and companies flagrantly lying to consumers about the insecurity of their products and services, undermine the very foundations of our society.

Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

Just in our lifetime our society has become looser and more private, it becomes extremely difficult to hold to any permanent commitment whatever, least of all to organized religion.

The inner world: those spiritual apartments to which we are reluctant to admit strangers.

Spiritual matters should be private.

My career is an open book, but my life is not.

I don't want to be famous famous. I'm happy on the second tier, where I have autonomy on a professional level but I can still go out to the movies without being recognized.

When you are in the public eye you cannot afford to show doubts. I do my crying alone.

I felt better being in the background. That's the way I like it.

In the past it never occurred to me that every casual remark of mine would be snatched up and recorded. Otherwise I would have crept further into my shell.

Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.

My library was to me an utterly private space that both enclosed and mirrored me.

Je me rendis compte que personne - pas même mon père, assis à quelques pas de moi - ne pouvait pénétrer mon espace de lecture, distinguer ce que le livre m'expliquait avec impudeur, et que rien, sinon ma propre volonté, ne pouvait en donner à quiconque la possibilité.

But there is something other than entertainment which one derives from reading in bed: a particular quality of privacy. Reading in bed is a self-centred act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.

Pero leer en la cama proporciona algo más que entretenimiento; brinda también una peculiar sensación de intimidad. Leer en la cama es un acto egocéntrico, inmóvil, libre de las ordinarias convenciones sociales, invisible para el mundo y que, como tiene lugar entre las sábanas, en el reino de la lascivia y la pereza pecaminosa, comparte algo de la emoción de las cosas prohibidas.

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

No, give me the past. It doesn't change; it's all there in black and white, and you can get to know about it comfortably and decorously and, above all, privately - by reading. … As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

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

Perhaps, in the future, when machines have attained to a state of perfection—for I confess that I am, like Godwin and Shelley, a believer in perfectibility, the perfectibility of machinery—then, perhaps, it will be possible for those who, like myself, desire it, to live in a dignified seclusion, surrounded by the delicate attentions of silent and graceful machines, and entirely secure from any human intrusion.