Secrecy Quotes - Page 9

• Abuse of any kind thrives off secrecy. I felt like if I started talking about it, maybe other people would. I wanted to break the silence. Now I feel I'm in a much better place emotionally than I've ever been anytime in my life.

  Chris Witty

  Talking, People, Silence

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• Secrecy involves a tension which, at the moment of revelation, finds its release.

  Georg Simmel

  Moments, Revelations, Release

  Georg Simmel, Otthein Rammstedt (2008). “Gesamtausgabe”

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• Silence is not just about secrecy, Your Majesty. It is grief and it is shame.

  Melina Marchetta

  Grief, Silence, Majesty

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• Everyone accepts that there are inevitably little areas of secrecy reserved for specialists; as regards things in general, many believe they are in on the secret.

  Guy Debord

  Believe, Secret, Littles

  "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle". Book by Guy Debord, 1988.

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• Most of us live in a condition of secrecy: secret desires, secret appetites, secret hatreds and relationship with the institutions which is extremely intense and uncomfortable. These are, to me, a part of the ordinary human condition. So I don't think I'm writing about abnormal things. ... Artists, in my experience, have very little center. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.

  John le Carre

  Real, Writing, Artist

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• Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types… Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop? Or was it a relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?

  Edward Snowden

  Government, Sea, Today

  "How Edward Snowden went from loyal NSA contractor to whistleblower" by Luke Harding, www.theguardian.com. February 1, 2014.

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• The history of medicine proves that in so far as man seeks to know himself and face his whole nature, he has become free from bewildered fear, despondent shame, or arrant hypocrisy. As long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion of ignorance and sophistication, denial and indulgence, suppression and stimulation, punishment and exploitation, secrecy and display, it will be associated with a duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity.

  Alfred Kinsey

  Sex, Honesty, Ignorance

  "Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male". Book by Alfred Kinsey, 1948.

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• I like to write in a shroud of secrecy because I have to keep finding ways to scare myself.

  M. Night Shyamalan

  Halloween, Writing, Scare

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• The year that Rutherford died (1938 [sic]) there disappeared forever the happy days of free scientific work which gave us such delight in our youth. Science has lost her freedom. Science has become a productive force. She has become rich but she has become enslaved and part of her is veiled in secrecy. I do not know whether Rutherford would continue to joke and laugh as he used to.

  Pyotr Kapitsa

  Years, Laughing, Forever

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• In our culture privacy is often confused with secrecy. Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy. We all need spaces where we can be alone with thoughts and feelings - where we can experience healthy psychological autonomy and can choose to share when we want to. Keeping secrets is usually about power, about hiding and concealing information.

  Bell Hooks

  Confused, Keeping Secrets, Space

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• Those without the gate frequently question the wisdom and right of the occultist to guard his knowledge by the imposition of oaths of secrecy. We are so accustomed to see the scientist give his beneficent discoveries freely to all mankind that we feel that humanity is wronged and defrauded if any knowledge be kept secret by its discoverers and not at once made available for all who desire to share in it.
  The knowledge is reserved in order that humanity may be protected from its abuse at the hands of the unscrupulous.

  Dion Fortune

  Discovery, Hands, Order

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• Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, . . . its enabling force. Transparency is the only real antidote.

  Glenn Greenwald

  Real, Political, Abuse

  Glenn Greenwald (2014). “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State”, p.21, Signal

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• If I were to disclose all their rituals, I think that it would be easy to prove that witches are not diabolists; but the oaths are solemn and the witches are my friends. I would not want to hurt their feelings. They have secrets which to them are sacred. They have good reason for their secrecy.

  Gerald Gardner

  Hurt, Thinking, Feelings

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• Knowing has two poles, and they are always poles apart: carnal knowing, the laying on of hands, the hanging of the fact by head or heels, the measurement of mass and motion, the calibration of brutal blows, the counting of supplies; and spiritual knowing, invisibly felt by the inside self, who is but a fought-over field of distraction, a stage where we recite the monotonous monologue that is our life, a knowing governed by internal tides, by intimations, motives, resolutions, by temptations, secrecy, shame, and pride.

  William H. Gass

  Spiritual, Knowledge, Pride

  William H. Gass (1997). “Finding a Form: Essays”, p.179, Cornell University Press

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• What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy? ... If I stick where I am, if I don't travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write. ... Arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments.

  Gilles Deleuze

  Believe, Writing, Journey

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• Secrecy, censorship, dishonesty, and blocking of communication threaten all the basic needs.

  Abraham Maslow

  Block, Communication, Needs

  "Motivation and Personality". Book by Abraham Maslow (p. 23), 1954.

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• There are many matters and many circumstances in which consciousness is undesirable and silence is golden, so that secrecy can be used as a marker to tell us that we are approaching the holy.

  Gregory Bateson

  Music, Silence, Listening

  Gregory Bateson, Mary Catherine Bateson (1987). “Angels fear: towards an epistemology of the sacred”, MacMillan Publishing Company

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• Abstract: Careful review of a vast array of relevant evidence clearly leads to the conclusion that some unidentified flying objects are intelligently controlled vehicles whose origin is outside our solar system. All the arguments against the extraterrestrial origin seem to be based upon false reasoning, misrepresentation of evidence, neglect of relevant information, ignorance of relevant technology, or pseudo sophisticated assumptions about alien appearance, motivation, or government secrecy...

  Stanton T. Friedman

  Motivation, Ignorance, Technology

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• The Air Force had put out a secret order for its pilots to capture UFOs. For the last six months we have been working with a congressional committee for investigating official secrecy concerning proof that UFOs are real machines under intelligent.

  Donald Keyhoe

  Real, Intelligent, Air

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• The U.S. Government hasn't maintained secrecy regarding UFOs. It's been leaking out all over the place. But the way it's been handled is by denial, by denying the truth of the documents that have leaked. By attempting to show them as fraudulent, as bogus of some sort. There has been a very large disinformation and misinformation effort around this whole area. And one must wonder, how better to hide something out in the open than just to say, 'It isn't there. You're deceiving yourself if you think this is true.' And yet, there it is right in front of you.

  Edgar Mitchell

  Thinking, Government, Effort

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• For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists in astronautics. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public. Why? Because authority is afraid that people may think of God knows what kind of horrible invaders. So the password still is: We have to avoid panic by all means

  Gordon Cooper

  Mean, Thinking, Years

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• If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in the petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive.

  Brené Brown

  Silence, Empathy, Three

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• Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god — and always like a god.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Book, Hair, Hands

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.110, Simon and Schuster

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

  Donna Tartt

  Children, Secret Love, House

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• There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States but around the world.

  Glenn Greenwald

  Government, Goal, United States

  “CNN Newsroom”, www.cnn.com. June 8, 2013.

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