53 Inspiring Privacy Quotes

In our increasingly digital world, the concept of privacy has become more nuanced and critical than ever before. As we navigate this complex landscape, it’s insightful to reflect on the thoughts of those who have long considered the value and importance of personal privacy. Whether you're an advocate for digital rights, a cybersecurity enthusiast, or simply someone who cherishes their personal space, quotes can serve as a powerful reminder of the principles we hold dear. In this collection of 53 inspiring privacy quotes, you’ll find wisdom and perspective that underscore the timeless significance of safeguarding what is personal. Join us as we delve into these words that resonate through time, offering guidance and motivation to prioritize privacy in our vibrant digital era.

1. “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” - Benjamin Franklin

2. “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

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

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

5. “To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.” - Anthony Burgess

6. “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

7. “Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like.” - William O. Douglas

8. “The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."[Public Utilities Commission v. Pollak, 343 U.S. 451, 467 (1952) (dissenting)]” - William O. Douglas

9. “[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

10. “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

11. “The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual.” - Earl Warren

12. “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.” - C.S. Lewis

13. “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

14. “Es soll keine Geheimnisse mehr geben, sagen die neuen Überwachungstheoretiker und meinen damit etwas recht Interessantes: dass die Ära, in der Geheimnisse zählten, in der Geheimnisse ihre Macht über das Leben von menschen ausüben konnten [...], vorbei ist; nicht, was sich zu wissen lohnt, kann nicht innerhalb von Sekunden und ohne großen Aufwand aufgedeckt werden; das Privatleben ist im Grunde ein Ding der Vergangenheit.” - J.M. Coetzee

15. “But why people need privacy? Why privacy is important? In China, every family live together, grandparents, parents, daughter, son and their relatives too. Eat together and share everything, talk about everything. Privacy make people lonely. Privacy make family fallen apart.” - Xiaolu Guo

16. “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

17. “I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy - to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.” - Virginia Woolf

18. “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

19. “[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

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

21. “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

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

23. “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

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

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

26. “In her more lucid moments, she knew that half her life had been sacrificed to safeguard her secret heart, to appease that unreasonable, mortal dread she suffered of being suddenly revealed to others in a nakedness of spirit that terrified her more than the concept of God's own retribution itself.” - Raymond Kennedy

27. “Listen, Harriet. I do unterstand. I know you don't want either to give or to take ... You don't want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person.""That's true. That's the truest thing you ever said.""All right. I can respect that. Only you've got to play the game. Don't force an emotional situation and then blame me for it.""But I don't want any situation. I want to be left in peace.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

28. “There are many ways to honor America. This book is mine. I have completed this journey of self-education in the belief that the most terrifying possibility since 9/11 has not been terrorism--as frightening as that is--but the prospect that Americans will give up their rights in pursuing the chimera of security.” - David K. Shipler

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

30. “You need to establish a degree of privacy and solitude in order to write” - Pamela Glass Kelly

31. “What’s insidious about the fear of what others will say is that you rarely hear them say it. You imagine what they’d say. You imagine they care that much about you. The fragility of our own egos gets the better of us” - Jeff Jarvis

32. “...For it began to occur to him that one way to become private was to respect another's privacy.” - Jane Yolen

33. “Either a municipal bog is a private place or it isn't. If it is a private place in which to shit, how is it not a private place in which to fellate?” - Stephen Fry

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

35. “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

36. “There's nothing like privacy. You know, I like people. It's nice that they might like my books and all that...but I'm not the book, see? I'm the guy who wrote it, but I don't want them to come up and throw roses on me or anything. I want them to let me breathe.” - Charles Bukowski

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

38. “A desire for privacy does not imply shameful secrets; Moglen argues, again and again, that without anonymity in discourse, free speech is impossible, and hence also democracy. The right to speak the truth to power does not shield the speaker from the consequences of doing so; only comparable power or anonymity can do that.” - Nick Harkaway

39. “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

40. “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

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

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

43. “Privacy - like eating and breathing - is one of life's basic requirements.” - Katherine Neville

44. “I have no privacy. But I feel so alone.” - Susan Beth Pfeffer

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

46. “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

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

48. “…if a thing can be said to be, to exist, then such is the nature of these expansive times that this thing which is must suffer to be touched. Ours is a time of connection; the private, and we must accept this, and it’s a hard thing to accept, the private is gone. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted. And if you’re thinking how awful these sentiments are, you are perfectly correct, these are awful times, but you must remember as well that this has always been the chiefest characteristic of the Present, to everyone living through it; always, throughout history, and so far as I can see for all the days and years to come until the sun and the stars fall down and the clocks have all ground themselves to expiry and the future has long long shaded away into Time Immemorial: the Present is always an awful place to be.” - Tony Kushner

49. “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

50. “The privacy of pride.” - Guy Gavriel Kay

51. “But there are other words for privacy and independence. They are isolation and loneliness.” - Megan Whalen Turner

52. “He that blows the coals in quarrels that he has nothing to do with, has no right to complain if the sparks fly in his face. - Ben Franklin” - Benjamin Franklin

53. “I stared up at the sky and raised my middle finger, just in case God was watching. I don't like being spied on.” - Annabel Pitcher