Secrecy Quotes

“Truth never damages a cause that is just.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”
― Diane Arbus

“There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.”
― Joseph Pulitzer

“Never hide things from hardcore thinkers. They get more aggravated, more provoked by confusion than the most painful truths.”
― Criss Jami

“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Gabriel García Márquez: a Life

“You should not honor men more than truth.”
― Plato

“If you have to keep a secret it's because you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.”
― David Nicholls, One Day

“It's not me who can't keep a secret. It's the people I tell that can't.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."

[Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the Voice of America; Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, February 26, 1962]”
― John F. Kennedy

“That is how heavy a secret can become. It can make blood flow easier than ink.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear

“It has always seemed that a fear of judgment is the mark of guilt and the burden of insecurity.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“If your parents’ faces never lit up when they looked at you, it’s hard to know what it feels like to be loved and cherished. If you come from an incomprehensible world filled with secrecy and fear, it’s almost impossible to find the words to express what you have endured. If you grew up unwanted and ignored, it is a major challenge to develop a visceral sense of agency and self-worth.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

“Is love just a butterfly? Love can tell us so many things about the deep waters of our inner self and the secrecy in the hidden brushwood of our emotions. ("Alpha and Omega")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Postmen have a legendary aura. A ring at the doorbell may inflame a sense of expectation, suspense, secrecy, hazard or even intrigue. Ringing twice may imply a warning that trouble is on the way or an appeal to make the coast clear. Not all mailmen, though, will ring twice and await an eye-catching Lana Turner, whom they can whisper: "With my brains and your looks, we could go places.” ("The postman always rings twice")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“The real thing about evil," said the Witch at the doorway, "isn't any of what you said. You figure out one side of it - the human side, say - and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. It's like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Who you are in public is a test of your conviction; who you are in private, integrity.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Almost all people are hypnotics. The proper authority saw to it that the proper belief should be induced, and the people believed properly.”
― Charles Fort

“Bene vixit, bene qui latuit."

(To live well is to live concealed.)”
― Ovid, The Tristia of Ovid

“Keep your innocence and ignorance aside, and expose yourself to dangerous situations, and understand the deeper secrets of life.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself — these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.”
― Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays

“Privacy - like eating and breathing - is one of life's basic requirements.”
― Katherine Neville

“Stop entertaining two faced people. You know the ones who have split personalities and untrustworthy habits. Nine times out of ten if they telling you stuff about another person, they're going to tell your business to other people. If they say, "You know I heard........." More than likely it's in their character to share false information. Beware of your box, circle, square! Whatever you want to call it.”
― Amaka Imani Nkosazana, Sweet Destiny

“Women are better at keeping secrets, but men are more comfortable with them”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

“I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas-- a community, a culture of vaginas. There's so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them-- like the Bermunda Triangle.”
― Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues

“From out of nowhere, Phury felt an overwhelming tide of guilt, like someone had popped the lid off all
his deepest concerns and his fears for the future of the race. He had to respond to it, couldn't bear the
pressure.
Riding the wave, he found himself saying in a rush, "We live and die for our kind. The species is our first
and only concern. We fight every night and count the jars of thelessers we kill. Stealth is the way we
protect the civilians. The less they know about us, the safer they are. That is why we disappeared.”
― J.R. Ward, Lover Awakened

“But let us laugh carelessly like other men.
Let us be timid even among fools.
Let us knot silence around our throats.
For they would surely kill us.”
― Glenway Wescott