Quotes About Privacy

Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God.

the church should just stay out of people's pants.

My Grandma once told me 'the Church should stay out of people's pants'.

Everybody knows, she thought, that we have a skeleton underneath our skin; there's no reason to show it

There were two classes of persons upon whom a duty of virtually absolute confidentiality rested: doctors and lovers.

The trouble with this country...is that we are utterly surrounded by busybodies trying to stop us doing things. Or telling us what to do...Big Brother, with his ubiquitous closed-circuit cameras-which now monitored, it seemed, every square inch of public space-and his condescending imprecations and warnings, was everywhere...In his view, it was up to the individual whether or not to approach a cliff edge; it was not the Government's business.

It was hard to disappear completely in Botswana, where there were fewer than two million people and where people had a healthy curiosity as to who was who and where people had come from. It was very difficult to be anonymous, even in Gaborone, as there would always be neighbours who would want to know exactly what one was doing and who one's people had been.

The juvenile adage Never kiss and tell had a sound moral instinct behind it.

What I said to you was private. We can have private reservations about a person's work, but that doesn't mean to say that we have to spell those out to him. It's called tact, Isabel!

Strong people didn't like witnesses to their weak moments.

There is no friendship that cares about an overheard secret.

It is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.

I do not take any pleasure whatsoever in being a famous person.

And I don't want to live anywhere where I am famous. It makes me very, very uncomfortable, because it conveys an advantage over people, and I don't like that.

Who was to know what went on in a person's heart? A wise woman kept her own counsel.

Writing about sex is not as personally revealing as one might think, because like anything else you write about, the words are not the deed. I have not done those words, I have done and felt private things for which words such as "sex" and "lust" are only poor apologies.

It is better to exist unknow to the law.--Irish Proverb

Eavesdroppers, she had always heard, and similarly people burrowing into private matters, found nothing to comfort them.

come out in daylight unless

His voice was a intimate as the rustle of sheets.

A man's religion and love life were nobody else's concern so long as neither of them gouged out some innocent bystander's eyes.

So I hired consultants to block all communication off the island, from landlines, cells, or computers. Cells can't get voice, text, e-mail, or Internet.

This Fyfe kept a very low profile. He must have been worth tens of millions, minimum, but there was very little about him online—Altschuler had checked. Occasionally he was written up for donating to this charity or that, but he managed to keep his business interests strictly out of the public eye.

This is awesome," he announced. "No more endless chatter. No more vicious, ugly thoughts from kids and parents and bosses and employees. No more disturbing sexual fantasies.