Privacy Quotes

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Memoirs of the life & writings of Benjamin Franklin

“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, Walden

“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 refuel."

(Audrey Hepburn: Many-Sided Charmer, LIFE Magazine, December 7, 1953)”
― Audrey Hepburn

“Solitude sometimes is best society.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“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, Notebooks 1951-1959

“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Gabriel García Márquez: a Life

“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

“Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.”
― Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis

“If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve.”
― David Sedaris

“I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said 'I want to be let alone!' There is all the difference.”
― Greta Garbo, Garbo

“To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.”
― Anthony Burgess, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Essays

“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, Poems of Fernando Pessoa

“Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Asfixia

“Ultimately, arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
― Edward Snowden

“I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
― Gaston Bachelard , The Poetics of Space

“She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.”
― David Brin

“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

“But there are other words for privacy and independence. They are isolation and loneliness.”
― Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia

“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, Letters and Other Writings of James Madison Volume 3

“I don't know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower.”
― Banksy

“Ultimately, saying that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.”
― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record

“Privacy is not something that I'm merely entitled to, it's an absolute prerequisite.”
― Marlon Brando

“I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.”
― Don DeLillo

“I have no privacy. But I feel so alone.”
― Susan Beth Pfeffer, Life As We Knew It

“Bene vixit, bene qui latuit."

(To live well is to live concealed.)”
― Ovid, The Tristia of Ovid

“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, Why I Write

“But she has gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and lying on top of each other on the Cambridge Common, prefer their privacy.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“[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, Hitch 22: A Memoir