A Quote by Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.

Privacy is absolutely essential to maintaining a free society. The idea that is at the foundation of the notion of privacy is that the citizen is not the tool or instrument of government - but the reverse... If you have no privacy, it will tend to follow that you have no political freedom.

Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.

Quote Topics

Absolutely Citizen Essential Follow Foundation Free Free Society Freedom Government Idea Instrument Maintaining Notion Political Political Freedom Privacy Reverse Society Tend Tool Will

Quote Author

Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.
American - Celebrity
Born: March 20, 1942

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.

Bruce Sterling

What I do think is important is this idea of a 'privacy native' where you grow up in a world where the values of privacy are very different. So it's not that I'm against privacy but that the values around privacy are very different for me and for people who are younger than my parent's generation, for whom it's weird to live in a glass house.

Harper Reed

I don't believe in privacy. I mean, I like the idea of privacy, but I don't believe that it happens anymore. I think privacy is something, I am afraid, we seem to be waving goodbye to.

Anjelica Huston

I think what we've had in the past is the government has said, "Well, we need to collect the whole haystack." And the haystack is Americans' privacy. Every Americans' privacy. We have to give up all of our privacy.

Rand Paul

There are definitely problems with technology companies, mostly around privacy, in my opinion, and the fact that they don't protect our privacy and we haven't passed privacy laws.

John Delaney

A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.

Edward Snowden

You have plenty of liberals out there who are all for the cops raiding their political enemies, they're all for the cops doing whatever they have to do to get whatever goods they want on their political enemies. And yet the Patriot Act comes, oh, you can't do it, it's an invasion of privacy. And yet in some cases they don't care about other people's privacy. Privacy is irrelevant to them depending on what the target is.

Rush Limbaugh

I don't think he would have had any trouble answering Justice Sonia Sotomayor's excellent challenge in a case involving GPS surveillance. She said we need an alternative to this whole way of thinking about the privacy now which says that when you give data to a third party, you have no expectations of privacy. And [Louis] Brandeis would have said nonsense, of course you have expectations of privacy because it's intellectual privacy that has to be protected. That's my attempt to channel him on some of those privacy questions.

Jeffrey Rosen

We do need to rethink privacy. I think we need to fall back on (former Supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter's definition of privacy which is, "Privacy is the right to be left alone."

Paul Saffo

Solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress.

Samuel D. Warren

I certainly respect privacy and privacy rights. But on the other hand, the first function of government is to guarantee the security of all the people.

Phil Crane

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

If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.

Phil Zimmermann

Privacy is an age of universal email collection and spying, with millions of CCTV cameras and warrantless spying pervasive; privacy has become virtually nonexistent and, therefore, extremely scarce and desirable. Bitcoin can be a completely anonymous transaction that maintains the user's privacy beyond the reach of any authority.

Max Keiser

The trouble is that privacy is at once essential to, and in tension with, both freedom and security. A cabinet minister who keeps his mistress in satin sheets at the French taxpayer's expense cannot justly object when the press exposes his misuse of public funds. Our freedom to scrutinise the conduct of public figures trumps that minister's claim to privacy. The question is: where and how do we draw the line between a genuine public interest and that which is merely what interests the public?