A Quote by William Hazlitt

People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.

William Hazlitt

Quote Topics

Addicted Cause Knowing People Sake Secrecy Why Without

Quote Author

William Hazlitt
English - Critic
April 10, 1778 - September 18, 1830

The whole question of pornography seems to me a question of secrecy. Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things. Secrecy has always an element of fear in it, amounting very often to hate. Modesty is gentle and reserved. Today, modesty is thrown to the winds, even in the presence of the grey guardians. But secrecy is hugged, being a vice in itself. And the attitude of the grey ones is: Dear young ladies, you may abandon all modesty, so long as you hug your dirty little secret.

D. H. Lawrence

Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things.

D. H. Lawrence

People equate patents with secrecy, that secrecy is what patents were designed to overcome. That's why the formula for Coca-Cola was never patented. They kept it as a trade secret, and they've outlasted patent laws by 80 years or more.

Craig Venter

While all deception requires secrecy, all secrecy is not meant to deceive.

Sissela Bok

For me, the constitutive element of an affair is the secrecy. It is the secrecy that leads to the lying, to the deception, to the duplicity. It is the structure of an affair - not the sexual or emotional behavior or what people actually are doing.

Esther Perel

Some men are tempted to violate secrecy from the uneasiness secrecy gives them, and others, merely to impress you with the extent of their confidence.

Norm MacDonald

There are some episodes in the history of Israel that are still kept under the strongest secrecy thick veil possible. Some of them are 40 years old, 50 years old, and are still under thick, thick secrecy, and anyone violating this secrecy would be thrown into jail himself.

Ronen Bergman

Families that have addicted members learn to operate with secrecy.

Drew Pinsky

We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.

Ian Mcewan

Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy.

Donna Tartt

Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy

Donna Tartt

People sometimes say I broke an oath of secrecy - one of the early charges leveled against me. But it's a fundamental misunderstanding, because there is no oath of secrecy for people who work in the intelligence community. You are asked to sign a civil agreement, called a Standard Form 312, which basically says if you disclose classified information, they can sue you; they can do this, that and the other. And you risk going to jail.

Edward Snowden

Secrecy is for losers. . . . It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most persuasive of Cold War-era regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

If secrecy is made out of the same stuff that the rest of the world is made out of, then it's fundamentally visible, which means that secrecy can only fail in the first instance, in the sense that you cannot make something disappear.