Secrecy Quotes - page 4

It was selfish and nothing more. The same way a child doesn't want to share her favorite toy. I understand that secrecy is part of, well, an aberrant behavior system. It comes from a bad place, not a place of light and generosity. And when you deprive your friends, or someone like your son Gunner, of experiences like I had, you're basically stealing from them. You're depriving them of something they have a right to. Knowledge is a basic human right. Equal access to all possible human experience is a basic human right. (Dave Eggers)
Real power begins where secrecy begins. View quote
Hannah Arendt
In all secrets there is a kind of guilt, however beautiful or joyful they may be, or for what good end they may be set to serve. Secrecy means evasion, and evasion means a problem to the moral mind. View quote
Gilbert Parker
Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of. View quote
Bill Moyers
Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each other. It's a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for giving them yet more power. View quote
Josh Marshall
Secrecy is the chastity of friendship. View quote
Jeremy Taylor
It is much more convenient not to be a public company. As a private company you don't have to give information to the public. Secrecy is an important factor of success in the commodity business. View quote
Marc Rich
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness. View quote
Niels Bohr
A case can be made... that secrecy is for losers. For people who don't realize how important information really is. The Soviet Union realized this too late. Openness is now a singular, and singularly American, advantage. We put it in peril by poking along in a mode of an age now past. It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most pervasive of Cold War-era regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us. View quote
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Secrecy is a compulsive reflex in this country. It strangles thought, delays scientific progress, and destroys integrity. View quote
Jack McDevitt
And yet, in our rush to respond to a very real and novel set of threats, the risk of government overreach -- the possibility that we lose some of our core liberties in pursuit of security -- also became more pronounced. [...] intelligence agencies cannot function without secrecy, which makes their work less subject to public debate. Yet there is an inevitable bias not only within the intelligence community, but among all of us who are responsible for national security, to collect more information about the world, not less. So in the absence of institutional requirements for regular debate -- and oversight that is public, as well as private or classified -- the danger of government overreach becomes more acute. And this is particularly true when surveillance technology and our reliance on digital information is evolving much faster than our laws. (Barack Obama)
Secrecy involves a tension which, at the moment of revelation, finds its release. View quote
Georg Simmel
Secrecy is thus, so to speak, a transition stadium between being and not-being. View quote
Georg Simmel
Every relationship between two individuals or two groups will be characterized by the ratio of secrecy that is involved in it. Even when one of the parties does not notice the secret factor, yet the attitude of the concealer, and consequently the whole relationship, will be modified by it. View quote
Georg Simmel
A man who makes assertions, or draws conclusions, regarding any given case, ought to be competent to investigate it. He has no right to throw the onus on others, declaring it their duly to prove him right or wrong. His duty is to demonstrate the truth of that which he asserts, or to cease from asserting. The men he calls upon to consider and judge have enough to do with themselves, in the examination, correction, or verification of their own views. The world little knows how many of the thoughts and theories which have passed through the mind of a scientific investigator have been crushed in silence and secrecy by his own severe criticism and adverse examination; that in the most successful instances not a tenth of the suggestions, the hopes, the wishes, the preliminary conclusions have been realized. View quote
Michael Faraday
There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy together with what lies under it. View quote
Friedrich Nietzsche
Let me frankly state that I see two great difficulties with this proposal. In view of your public position, such action on our part would inevitably produce worldwide speculation that discussions were under way and would impair the privacy and secrecy of those discussions. Secondly, there would inevitably be grave concern on our part whether your government would make use of such action by us to improve its military position. View quote
Lyndon B. Johnson
Privacy is something that we maintain for the good of ourselves and others. Secrecy we keep to separate ourselves from others, even those we love. View quote
Mary Alice Monroe
The Panama Papers opened yet another window on the global system of financial corruption, showing how political leaders and businesses use shell companies in secrecy havens like the British Virgin Islands and many US states to evade taxes and hide corruption and other crimes. Yet the system of corruption depends on another factor beyond secrecy, one that is perhaps even more important: impunity. Impunity means that the rich and powerful escape from punishment even when their malfeasance is in full view. View quote
Jeffrey D. Sachs
People grow up learning to be silent about their sexuality, so where are they going to learn to talk about it when they are in a relationship? Shame, guilt, ignorance, reservation, prudishness, all kinds of different cultural systems and social stereotypes shroud sexuality in secrecy and in silence. And there's the romantic notion. "If I say in the beginning, that I am missing something, you are instantly going to think that means you are not enough." View quote
Esther Perel
The meaning of secrecy is very different when the model of love is one of transparency. So to understand the politics of secrecy and revelation, you need to understand the larger culture in which the couple lives and also the culture of the couple itself. What does intimacy mean to them? Where does the couple draw the line between togetherness and separateness? That's what informs you. You always ask, "What would happen if I tell? What would happen if I don't tell?" Sometimes, the partner doesn't want to know. (Esther Perel)
While the intelligence profession oftentimes demands secrecy, it is critically important that there be a full and open discourse on intelligence matters with the appropriate elected representatives of the American people. View quote
John O. Brennan
About the Bofors issue: He (Rajiv Gandhi) said that he was quite ready to get all the details regarding payments to Indian nationals, but then Bofors Company did not want to violate commercial secrecy as it would affect its future deals. I told Rajiv, as Deface Minister I knew that all arms manufacturers were employing agents and remunerating them under different names. Therefore, it would be unrealistic to think that foreign arms dealers did not have agents. But utmost care should be taken to see that they did not influence our decisions. View quote
R. Venkataraman
I am a private person; I think that's important if you're an actor. But there's a difference between privacy and secrecy, and I'm not a secretive person. View quote
Andrew Scott
...I had learnt that the most effective way to spread a story was to tell it to one or two Arabs under a pledge of secrecy. View quote
Wilfred Thesiger