Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

[Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissenting)]

Louis D. Brandeis

Tags: liberty freedom government civil-rights privacy encroachment policy



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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.

Anthony Burgess

Tags: solitude privacy encroachment



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Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like.

William O. Douglas

Tags: liberty freedom government control privacy corporations encroachment surveillance corporate-culture



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Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.

Virginia Woolf

Tags: sexuality liberty empowerment gender women morality feminism self-determination misogyny hypocrisy double-standards encroachment dignity social-norms suppression chastitiy



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Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.

Virginia Woolf

Tags: arts empowerment gender women creativity liberation artists skills abilities encroachment occupation careers women-writers restrictions



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To many people I have no doubt that it appears merely silly. I once found it expressed in a rather amusing way in a Russian Book called Dal Zoviet, which means the lure of far horizons. The author is Galinischev Kutuzoff [Golenischev-Kutuzov], and he tells of a man in Northern Mongolia who goes out of his yurt every morning to breathe the free air of the steppes and enjoy the immensity and the solitude. But one day he feels an uncomfortable sense of oppression, almost as if he could not breathe. He looks about to find the reason. And there, across the undulating grasslands, is a line of telegraph poles. And after the place never the same to him again.

Daniele Varè

Tags: civilization encroachment kingdom-come golenischev-kutuzov



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If we are to violate the Constitution, will the people submit to our unauthorized acts? Sir, they ought not to submit; they would deserve the chains that these measures are forging for them. The country will swarm with informers, spies, delators and all the odious reptile tribe that breed in the sunshine of a despotic power ... [T]he hours of the most unsuspected confidence, the intimacies of friendship, or the recesses of domestic retirement afford no security. The companion whom you most trust, the friend in whom you must confide, the domestic who waits in your chamber, all are tempted to betray your imprudent or unguarded follie; to misrepresent your words; to convey them, distorted by calumny, to the secret tribunal where jealousy presides — where fear officiates as accuser and suspicion is the only evidence that is heard ... Do not let us be told, Sir, that we excite a fervour against foreign aggression only to establish a tyranny at home; that [...] we are absurd enough to call ourselves ‘free and enlightened’ while we advocate principles that would have disgraced the age of Gothic barbarity and establish a code compared to which the ordeal is wise and the trial by battle is merciful and just."

[opposing the Alien

Edward Livingston

Tags: liberty freedom government civil-rights privacy encroachment policy surveillance suppression



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We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government."

[Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 323, 341 (1966) (dissenting)]

William O. Douglas

Tags: freedom government privacy encroachment surveillance



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These examples and many others demonstrate an alarming trend whereby the privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man's life at will."

[Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 323, 343 (1966) (dissenting)]

William O. Douglas

Tags: liberty freedom government civil-rights privacy encroachment surveillance



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For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable."

[The Eternal Value of Privacy, May 18, 2006]

Bruce Schneier

Tags: individuality liberty freedom observation privacy encroachment surveillance



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