360 Privacy Quotes

Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages - just don't catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.

In my life, I don't need to have my face plastered everywhere. It's not really something I want.

Ephemeral work made outside, for and about a day, lies at the core of my art and its making must be kept private.

I don't keep any close friends. I don't keep any secrets. I don't need friends. I just tell everybody everything, that's all.

I'm very, very blessed. But my safety, my privacy, and my respect are three things that I feel like are trying to be taken away from me right now. As a mother I have to speak up and say something. I have to speak up.

A security cam is one small part of a much larger universe of cams. The much larger effect, socially, politically and economically, is going to come from a much larger trend.

I do have two data identities. I have my name, Bruce Sterling, which is my public name under which I write novels. I also have my other name, which is my legal name under which I own property and vote.

I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere.

Privacy under what circumstance? Privacy at home under what circumstances? You have more privacy if everyone's illiterate, but you wouldn't really call that privacy. That's ignorance.

You don't get to cut that chain of evidence and start over. You're always going to be pursued by your data shadow, which is forming from thousands and thousands of little leaks and tributaries of information.

I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.

It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.

The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual.

In the biotech revolution, it is the human body, not iron or steel or plastic, that's at the source. Are the biocapitalists going to be allowed to dig without consent into our genetic codes, then market them?

We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.

My show is my statement. What I have to say is on the screen. My life is my own. I don't want to talk about my private self. Why should I?

If your sexual fantasies were truly of interest to others, they would no longer be fantasies.

Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

I consider my selfbeing ... that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man.

There are only two occasions when Americans respect privacy, especially in Presidents. Those are prayer and fishing.

I'm not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the president.

It's not like I'm hanging out at shopping malls or going to celebrity golf tournaments. I'm so in my own little world. I got my dog, my music, my brother, a couple of friends.

Him, who incessantly laughs in the street, you may commonly hear grumbling in his closet.

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

I had rather take my chance that some traitors will escape detection than spread abroad a spirit of general suspicion and distrust, which accepts rumor and gossip in place of undismayed and unintimidated inquiry.

Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.

It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

Privacy was in sufficient danger before TV appeared, and TV has given it its death blow.

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives.

Never crowd youngsters about their private affairs - sex especially. When they are growing up, they are nerve ends all over, and resent (quite properly) any invasion of their privacy. Oh, sure, they'll make mistakes - but that's their business, not yours. (You made your own mistakes, did you not?)

Writing, is not necessarily something to be ashamed of - but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

The federal government has no right to treat all Americans as criminals by spying on their relationship with their doctors, employers, or bankers.

Demanding domestic security in times of war invites carelessness in preserving civil liberties and the right of privacy. Frequently the people are only too anxious for their freedoms to be sacrificed on the altar of authoritarianism thought to be necessary to remain safe and secure. Nothing would please the terrorists more than if we willingly give up some of our cherished liberties while defending ourselves from their threat.

In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness.

What I feel or believe or experience is my business, and what I do is all our businesses; and reward or punish me according to whether I play the game well - ethically and rightly - or unethically.

The mark of a basic shit is that he can't mind his own business.

I understand there is a need for a stable and orderly transition to that leadership, but that people should give me the space to ensure that happens and that this debate is not best conducted in the pages of the Mail on Sunday.

In this day and age if you've got the technology then it's vital to use that technology to track people down. The number on the database should be the maximum number you can get.

I'd like to know more about his relationships with women. No, on second thought, I wouldn't. - Ingrid Bergman

Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone

There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. ... It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. ... I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. ... I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work.

Jack and Mary and Gracie and I were going to dinner one night and Gracie asked Mary, 'Is Jack really thirty-nine?' And Mary said, 'Ridiculous.' Then she asked, 'And how is his sex life?' and Mary said, 'Ridiculous!' ~ George Burns

We were at a restaurant, and Vanessa was extremely pregnant. All they wanted were photographs of me and Vanessa and the belly. At that point I thought, 'Man, I'm not one of those whiny actors who says, 'Oh, the paparazzi, they wont leave me alone.' I could give a fuck about it. However, on this particular night I just decided, Look, this is my girl. This is our first baby. I'm not going to let you fucking people turn this into a circus. You ain't turning this deeply, profoundly beautiful, spiritual, life-changing experience into a novelty. Not without a fight. I went out and talked to them. I said, 'Look, guys, I know what you're after. I understand you have a job to do. But you're just not going to turn this into a circus. Just give us a break. You're not going to get what you want tonight. I'll see you another time.' They were very aggressive: 'Fuck you, Johnny.' That kind of shit. I swung around and told Vanessa, 'Go out the front door, get in the car so they don't get us together or get your belly. She did. She was in the car, so everything was going to be cool, but they were so shitty. One guy was trying to hold the door open. He had his hand wedged in there. I looked down at the ground, and there was a 17-inch wooden plank, a two-by-two or something. Instinct took over. I picked it up and whacked the guys hand. I went outside and said, 'Now I want you to take my picture, because the first fucking guy who hits a flash, I'm going to kick his skull in. Let's go. Take my picture.' They didn't take my picture. I was livid. They walked backward down the street. I walked them away from Vanessa in the car and down this other street. It was beautiful. It was well worth it. It was kind of poetic. The next thing I knew, I saw flashing lights on the buildings around me. And a paddy wagon. It was brief. It was around 11:30 or midnight, and I was out by five or six the next morning. No one filed charges against me, because they didn't want their names exposed. Had they filed charges they would have had to give their names and would have lost their anonymity. The cops were actually terrific, real sweet. As I said, I didn't mind as much before I had kids. Everything changes when it comes to my children. (2004)

For the TIME story, at least 10 attorneys and six private detectives were unleashed by Scientology and its followers in an effort to threaten, harass and discredit me. Last Oct. 12, not long after I began this assignment, I planned to lunch with Eugene Ingram, the church's leading private eye and a former cop. Ingram, who was tossed off the Los Angeles police force In 1981 for alleged ties to prostitutes and drug dealers, had told me that he might be able to arrange a meeting with church boss David Miscavige. Just hours before the lunch, the church's 'national trial counsel,' Earle Cooley, called to inform me that I would be eating alone. Alone, perhaps, but not forgotten. By day's end, I later learned, a copy of my personal credit report -- with detailed information about my bank accounts, home mortgage, credit-card payments, home address and Social Security number -- had been illegally retrieved from a national credit bureau called Trans Union. The sham company that received it, 'Educational Funding Services' of Los Angeles, gave as its address a mail drop a few blocks from Scientology's headquarters. The owner of the mail drop is a private eye named Fred Wolfson, who admits that an Ingram associate retained him to retrieve credit reports on several individuals. Wolfson says he was told that Scientology's attorneys 'had judgments against these people and were trying to collect on them.' He says now, 'These are vicious people. These are vipers.' Ingram, through a lawyer, denies any involvement in the scam. --Richard Behar, The Thriving Cults of Greed and Power, Time Magazine, May 6, 1991, sidebar: 'The Scientologists and Me'.

Aaron Russo: Do you think America is going deeper and deeper into becoming a police state? Ron Paul: Yeah, I think we're moving in that direction, because there's not much we can do without permission. The absence of a police state is that people are free, and if you don't commit crimes you can do what you want. But today, you can't open up a business, you can't develop land, you can't go to the bank, you can't go to the doctor without the government knowing what you're doing. They talk about medical privacy, that's gone. Financial privacy, that's gone. The right to own property, that's essentially gone. So you have to get permission from the government for almost everything. And if that is the definition of a police state, that you can't do anything unless the government gives you permission, we're well on our way. This is something that people eventually, I hope, will get sick and tired of, and say enough is enough.

Adam Curry: The right to your own body, as a woman, do you not have the right to put in or take out of that body what you want? Ron Paul: You have responsibilities, with the exception of rape, of the consequences of having intercourse. But if you carry that argument to its logical conclusion, I also think you have your right to your property, your home is your castle, I don't want any cameras, nothing in there. But some parents might kill their children, we don't put cameras and we don't take away rights of parents because one out of 14 million might kill their child. But, if we know there's some parents in their home just murdering their children, all of the sudden this becomes very important. So the sanctity of the home does not permit the killing of the children. [...] I can get paid a lot of money to do the abortion right before birth, but if I do it one minute after birth I go to prison for murder. And one time there was a case where the abortionist did the abortion, but the baby was born alive, so he drowned the baby. I think he was convicted of a crime, but if he could have only killed the baby sooner... That's why this partial birth abortion developed, because you didn't ever want the baby to be born alive.

To the public eye, the spouses of well-known writers are all but invisible, and no one knew it better than Lisey Landon. Her husband won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, but Lisey had given one interview in her life. This was for the well-known women's magazine that publishes the column 'Yes, I'm Married to Him!' She spent roughly half of its five hundred word length explaining that her nickname rhymed with 'CeeCee'. Most of the other half had to do with her recipe for slow-cooked roast beef. Lisey's sister Amanda said that the picture accompanying the interview made Lisey look fat. None of Lisey's sister were immune to the pleasures of setting the cat among the pigeons ('stirring up a stink' had been their father's phrase for it), or having a good natter about someone else's dirty laundry, but the only one Lisey had a hard time liking was this same Amanda. Eldest (and oddest) of the onetime Debusher girls of Lisbon Falls, Amanda currently lived alone, in a house which Lisey had provided, a small, weather-tight place not too far from Castle View where Lisey, Darla, and Cantata could keep a eye on her. Lisey had bought it for her seven years ago, five before Scott died. Died Young. Died Before His Time, as the saying was. Lisey still had trouble believing he'd been gone for two years. It seemed both longer and the blink of an eye.

Let my mother be.

larvatus Prodeo