Privacy Quotes

Who could deny that privacy is a jewel? It has always been the mark of privilege, the distinguishing feature of a truly urbane culture. Out of the cave, the tribal teepee, the pueblo, the community fortress, man emerged to build himself a house of his own with a shelter in it for himself and his diversions. Every age has seen it so. The poor might have to huddle together in cities for need's sake, and the frontiersman cling to his neighbors for the sake of protection. But in each civilization, as it advanced, those who could afford it chose the luxury of a withdrawing-place.

Phyllis McGinley

You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it's the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there's not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed.

Christopher Hitchens

The privacy and dignity of our citizens are 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 a person's life.

William O. Douglas

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

What man art thou that, thus bescreened in night,So stumblest on my counsel?*Who are you? Why do you hide in the darkness and listen to my private thoughts?*

William Shakespeare

Having been blacklisted from working in television during the McCarthy era, I know the harm of government using private corporations to intrude into the lives of innocent Americans. When government uses the telephone companies to create massive databases of all our phone calls it has gone too far.note: May 22, 2006, Terkel, along with other plaintiffs, filed a suit in federal district court against AT&T to stop them from giving customer phone records to the National Security Agency without a court order.

Studs Terkel

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

I've always been very zealous about not invading other people's private spaces.

Peter Jennings

May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best -- out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.

May Sarton

An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country.

George Bernard Shaw

Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place?

Kate Millet

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

George Eliot