Top 366 Secrecy Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

Lawyers, judges, doctors, shrinks, accountants, investigators and, not least, journalists could not do the most basic tasks without a veil of secrecy. Why shouldn't the same be true of those professionals who happen to be government officials?

Anyone who studies declassified documents soon becomes aware that government secrecy is largely an effort to protect policy makers from scrutiny by citizens, not to protect the country from enemies.

The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

Most child welfare agencies tend to embrace secrecy because the people who lead them tend to be mediocre and don't want you to see how poor a job they are doing.

In such a case secrecy must be absolute to be effective, and although mere vague curiosity induced many persons of my intimate acquaintance to ask to be allowed to just go in and have a peep, I never admitted anyone.

From the very beginning of this movement, Scientology has always been a very closeted organization. That aura of secrecy is something that the present-day management continues.

Each of us when he appears before his fellows is clothed in a certain dignity. But every man knows what unconfessable things pass within the secrecy of his own heart.

There is secrecy and betrayal but that's more part and parcel of the kind of anguish that the people go through. And maybe that's modes of survival, rather than modes of consciousness.

Secrecy is the underlying mistake that makes every innovation go wrong in Michael Crichton novels and films! If AI happens in the open, then errors and flaws may be discovered in time... perhaps by other, wary AIs!

Then I realized that secrecy is actually to the detriment of my own peace of mind and self, and that I could still sustain my belief in privacy and be authentic and transparent at the same time. It was a pretty revelatory moment, and there's been a liberating force that's come from it.

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.

Secrecy is the soul of all great designs. Perhaps more has been effected by concealing our own intentions than by discovering those of our enemy.

This persistence as private firms continued because it ensured the maximum of anonymity and secrecy to persons of tremendous public power who dreaded public knowledge of their activities as an evil almost as great as inflation.

I'm not necessarily opposed to greater American involvement. But if that's the way the Mexican government wants to go, it needs to come clean about it. Just look at what we learned from Iraq. Secrecy led to malfeasance. It led to corrupt contracting.

If governments did not mislead their citizens so often, there would be less need for secrecy, and if leaders knew they could not rely on keeping the public in the dark about what they are doing, they would have a powerful incentive to behave better.

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.

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.

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.

In many competitive worlds like luxury, things are done behind closed doors and with secrecy, so one day I had a eureka moment: for one weekend we show everything, full transparency, forget about business or commerce and showcase our work.

I guess you could say I'm a closeted animal person, because a lot of my life I did it in secrecy. I was always fascinated with exotic animals, particularly reptiles, from the age of 6 when I got a pet tortoise.

Our constitutional system is defined by a balance between the public's need for transparency and the government's need to have a zone of secrecy around decision making. Both are important, yet they are mutually exclusive.

Governments want to control information. To do this, they have elaborate systems for promoting themselves via propaganda departments and for ensuring confidentiality with official-secrets laws. There are good reasons for these: people need information, and national security deserves secrecy.

Leaks are not the problem; they are the symptom. They reveal a disconnect between what people want and need to know and what they actually do know. The greater the secrecy, the more likely a leak.

Ultrasound is instrumental in the fight against abortion precisely because it allows women to make an informed choice by shedding light in a place which, for most of its history, has been shrouded in secrecy.

A representative assembly, although extremely well qualified, and absolutely necessary, as a branch of the legislative, is unfit to exercise the executive power, for want of two essential properties, secrecy and dispatch.

My parents wouldn't let me listen to 'American Idiot.' So it felt very rebellious to go over to my friend's house after school and listen to it in secrecy.

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!

The government's instinct is to shroud itself in secrecy - to act like the office of a president instead of as a collective cabinet government held to account by the elected House of Commons.

We are all, in a sense, experts on secrecy. From earliest childhood we feel its mystery and attraction. We know both the power it confers and the burden it imposes. We learn how it can delight, give breathing space and protect.

To the man who cherishes a secret in his breast, there is a still greater secret unexplored. Our most indifferent acts may be a matter for secrecy, but whatever we do with the utmost truthfulness and integrity, by virtue of its pureness, must be transparent as light.

There was reason for STILLMAN'S EXTREME SECRECY. HE WAS PREPARING TO EXTEND THE CITY BANK'S POWER OVER THE EARTH AND FULLY RECOGNIZED THAT THIS AMBITION WOULD DRAW HIM INTO THE WEB OF INTERNATIONAL COMMERCIAL INTRIGUE AND ESPIONAGE

As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets.

The United States builds weapons presumably secretly, and then it sells them to other countries. So the whole business of secrecy is kind of a fake issue because hardly anything technological remains a secret for very long.

Government ought to be all outside and no inside. . . . Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety.

The atomic weapons race and the secrecy surrounding it crushed American democracy. It induced us to conduct government according to lies. It distorted justice. It undermined American morality.

Secrecy can spring from the best motives; but as it grows it begins to exist only for itself, only for its own sake, only to cover its own abuses.

Men and women understand different things about personal boundaries. What men call privacy, women know as secrecy.

There are so many canceled games that people don't know about and so many stories people can't tell because they're restricted by this ridiculous culture of secrecy.

There are many hands touching ballots after a voter drops his ballot into the ballot box. There is no guarantee of ballot secrecy for anyone, which makes the whole system vulnerable to intimidation and bribery.

The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy. In the absence of an official picture of what our government is doing, and by what authority, many in the public fill the void by envisioning the worst.

Secrecy of design, when combined with rapidity of execution, like me column that guided Israel in the deserts, becomes the guardian pillar of light and fire to our friends, a cloud of overwhelming and impenetrable darkness to our enemies.

The broad outlines of the Double Cross deception have been known since 1972, when Sir John Masterman, the former chairman of the double agent committee, controversially published his account of the operation in defiance of official secrecy.

Let me get something straight: I have no problem with ghostwriting as a thing unto itself. What bothers me is the way it's shrouded in secrecy, ignored to the point of straight-up lying. Why not be honest?

I have replaced my instinct for secrecy with an instinct for confession.

Thus we work not in the light of public opinion but in the secrecy of the chamber; and perhaps the best of us are apt at times to forget the delicacies and sincerities which under these conditions are essential to harmony and honour.

In human geography, we think about landscapes as being political, social, cultural, economic, and physical things all at the same time. And that's the way that I wanted to approach the question of state secrecy.

Oracle, for example, has even hired people to dumpster dive for information about its competitor, Microsoft. It's not even illegal, because trash isn't covered by data secrecy laws.

Too many Americans mistrust their government. And unnecessary government secrecy feeds this mistrust.

The eighteenth-century view of the garden was that it should lead the observer to the enjoyment of the aesthetic sentiments of regularity and order, proportion, colour and utility, and, furthermore, be capable of arousing feelings of grandeur, gaiety, sadness, wildness, domesticity, surprise and secrecy.

Nakedness is uncomely, as well in mind as body, and it addeth no small reverence to men's manners and actions if they be not altogether open. Therefore set it down: That a habit of secrecy is both politic and moral.

Laughter has something in it common with the ancient words of faith and inspiration; it unfreezes pride and unwinds secrecy; it makes people forget themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves.

Normally, the secrecy and lack of transparency surrounding the appointment of judges of the higher judiciary ensures that citizens come to know of these appointments only after the Presidential notification, announcing the appointments, is issued.

The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

Let it be your business every day, in the secrecy of the inner chamber, to meet the holy God. You will be repaid for the trouble it may cost you. The reward will be sure and rich.

Leaks are good. There is too much secrecy in our government. Sometimes the government knows about a problem and it takes a leak to embarrass the bureaucracy and get them to do something about it.

For men, privacy means not being told stuff that would hurt. For women, secrecy is having stuff go on behind your back.

The main reasons for the growth and institutionalization of corruption are: a culture of secrecy with lack of transparency, and weak institutions for securing the accountability of public servants, such as the Vigilance bodies, the criminal investigative agencies and the judiciary.

Everything is accessible to everyone all the time, and I think there are wondrous things to treasure with what the Internet has made available to journalists. But I think it's also had some effects that are less pleasant. It has chipped away at a sense of privacy and secrecy.

The nobles and the noble Houses maneuver for advantage. They do things they think will help them, or hurt and enemy, or both. Usually, it's all done in secrecy, or if not, they try to make it seem as if they're doing something other than what they are.

Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.