30 Privacy Quotes For 2023

In an era where digital footprints are as telling as one's personal diary, privacy has evolved from a mere concept to an essential right that many fiercely guard. The rapid advancements in technology and data collection have sparked intense debates and concerns about personal privacy. To shed light on this poignant topic, we've curated a collection of the top 30 privacy quotes for 2023. These quotes encapsulate the essence of privacy, echoing the thoughts of thinkers, activists, and innovators who champion the cause of personal freedom and security in the digital age. Explore their words and reflect on what privacy means to you in today's interconnected world.

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

2. “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

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

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

5. “[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

6. “Maybe all of us at Hailsam had little secrets like that -- little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone without fears and longing.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

7. “When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?” - Milan Kundera

8. “Solitude sometimes is best society.” - John Milton

9. “[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

10. “It used to be on the Internet no one knew you were a dog. Now not only doeseveryone know that you are a dog, they know what kind of a dog you are, whoyou run with, where you hide your bones, the accidental piddle behind thecouch, the fight you got into with the boxer, and your thoughts on the hotpoodle down the street.” - Nancy E. Willard

11. “Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.” - Stephen King

12. “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

13. “You already have zero privacy. Get over it! --Scott McNealy CEO Sun Microsystems 1999” - Christian Parenti

14. “All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

15. “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

16. “I don’t like to share my personal life… it wouldn’t be personal if I shared it.” - George Clooney

17. “Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.” - Siri Hustvedt

18. “You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.” - Don DeLillo

19. “In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test.” - Christopher Hitchens

20. “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

21. “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

22. “I do not tell her about how much I look forward to going to the Wright barn. How those couple of hours in his studio feel like an escape, a refuge. Nor do I tell Rachel that I think Damian has the most beautiful hands I've ever seen, that he walks like a cat, that he has the clearest eyes, which seem able to see absolutely everything about me. That he seems to be the loneliest person I've ever met, and it breaks my heart. All of these things feel private. Precious. And I don't want to share them with Rachel. Not yet, anyway.” - Lisa Ann Sandell

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

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

25. “All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.” - Katharine Fullerton Gerould

26. “Stranger: Do you believe in Jesus, my friend?Foreigner: O yes, I do but who the hell are you?” - Toba Beta

27. “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

28. “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

29. “you dont knock then i wont answer” - kasie guzman345

30. “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