Private Lives Quotes

#1. The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history.

Raymond Queneau

#2. And watched Alan Rickman act up a storm in Private Lives. Someone once said that this highly mannered actor had made a career out of being brilliant in roles where no brilliance was required.

Joe Queenan

#3. For some people it's real therapy to talk to journalists about their private lives and inner thoughts. But I would rather keep something to myself.

Mick Jagger

#4. People are very reluctant to talk about their private lives but then you go to the internet and they're much more open.

Paulo Coelho

#5. Private choices are not private; they all have public consequences ... Our society is the sum total of what millions of individuals do in their private lives. That sum total of private behavior has worldwide public consequences of enormous magnitude. There are no completely private choices.

James E. Faust

#6. I've learned that social media and our private lives, you know, our private lives are not so private anymore, so it takes a little bit of getting used to.

Jeremy Lin

#7. I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives. It all depends on a combination of circumstances. If all the various cosmic thingummys fuse at the same moment, and the right spark is struck, there's no knowing what one mightn't do.

Laurie R. King

#8. She had never told us on, had never played cat-and-mouse with us, she was not at all interested in our private lives. She was our friend.

Harper Lee

#9. Yes, religion and politics do mix. America is a nation based on biblical principles. Christian values dominate our government. The test of those values is the Bible. Politicians who do not use the bible to guide their public and private lives do not belong in office.

Beverly LaHaye

#10. Poetry, for me, is the answer to, 'How does one stay sane when private lives are being ransacked by public events?' It's something that hangs over your head all the time.

Lisel Mueller

#11. All private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#12. When I came to England I was quite surprised to see that you people have it too. But why people are so interested in other people's private lives is beyond me. It's like group hypnosis, or something - a giant distraction.

Robert B. Weide

#13. We do not want to live in a theocracy. We should maintain that barrier and government has no business telling someone what they ought to believe or how they should conduct their private lives.

Robert Reich

#14. I like fiction that deals with matters that are of burning importance to us in our private lives. And not all short stories are like that. In general, short stories - and maybe this is a little bit off-topic - but I think short stories have this bad association with, like, waiting rooms.

Lorin Stein

#15. Moral habits, induced by public practices, are far quicker in making their way into men's private lives, than the failings and faults of individuals are in infecting the city at large.

Plutarch

#16. There is no separation between the gospel and culture, between how we live in society and how we live in our private lives, between the lordship of Jesus inside the four walls of a church building and outside that building.

Michael Brown

#17. I found myself wondering, what would it be like to have a strange woman living in your home, nursing your child? My resulting research into the private lives of women in the 18th and 19th centuries inspired me and provided the backbone for [Lady of Milkweed Manor] novel.

Julie Klassen

#18. I see two opposite tendencies in Turkish society: people feel demoralized, they lose the interest in politics and retreat to their private lives; or they become very angry and even more politicized, and radicalized. Both trends are troublesome.

Elif Safak

#19. In our private lives in the last decade, we've gone through enormous change that has affected everything, from the way we do business to how we view intelligence and attention. We have to rethink it all in a more interactive, networked, and collaborative way.

Cathy Davidson

#20. I really hate people who feel their private lives should be paraded, and there are magazines like 'Hello!,' 'OK' and 'Bella' totally devoted to this.

Ross Kemp

#21. I couldn't write a happy movie or romantic comedy to save my life. Yes, Noel Coward's an idol, but his plays are serious to me. 'Private Lives' and 'Design for Living' both have an edge. Without psychoanalyzing myself, I think I exorcise my demons in my work.

John Logan

#22. It was funny, she thought, that before she had ever had a job she had always thought of an office as a place where people came to work, but now it seemed as if it was a place where they also brought their private lives for everyone else to look at, paw over, comment on and enjoy

Rona Jaffe

#23. The busybodies have begun to infect American society with a nasty intolerance - a zeal to police the private lives of others and hammer them into standard forms - A Nation of Finger Pointers.

Lance Morrow

#24. The backstage play, in which the private lives of theater people are put onstage for the world to see, is one of the diciest of dramatic genres.

Terry Teachout

#25. No wonder all the great comedians had such destructive private lives ... After you get the audience into that kind of frenzy, and you are being worshiped like the false idol you are, how do you leave the stage and transition back into real life? ... What is there left to do but set yourself on fire?

Margaret Cho

#26. Boyfriends have to understand me and my needs. They have to know what I want out of my life and about my strict regime. I go to bed at 10pm and not later. I separate my professional and private lives.

Anna Kournikova

#27. We are used to female writers who use their private lives as unmitigated material being somewhat hormonal; this somehow 'excuses' what might be seen as a highly unfeminine ability to turn their personal upsets into money.

Julie Burchill

#28. A kid thinks her mother is just that
hers. A mother is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn't want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs. The world made women's private lives a public affair to people who knew them and even people who didn't.

J. Courtney Sullivan

#29. Bastards too have a right to their private lives.

Stieg Larsson

#30. Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.

Gore Vidal

#31. The photographic frame is no longer used as a documentary window into undisturbed private lives, but as a stage on which the subjects consciously direct themselves to bring forward hidden information that is not normally displayed on the surface.

Arthur Tress

#32. John Bond has blackened my name with his insinuations about the private lives of football managers. Both my wives are upset.

Malcolm Allison

#33. I don't believe we ought to be discriminating against people for their private lives.

Scott Tipton

#34. I'm not a member of any faith community, and I think faith is a deeply personal issue that individuals should deal with in their private lives.

Kyrsten Sinema

#35. The Fourth Amendment is clear; we should be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects, and all warrants must have probable cause. Today the government operates largely in secret, while seeking to know everything about our private lives - without probable cause and without a warrant.

Ron Paul

#36. It is time to stop personal destruction and prying into private lives

William J. Clinton

#37. There are those who think that the private lives of candidates are none of our business. But when those candidates ask us for our attention as they explain their plans for how they will represent us, no one should be surprised at our interest in how they represent themselves.

Marlo Thomas

#38. I have noticed, with much distress, the excessive wartime activity of the investigating bureaus of Congress and the administration, with their impertinent and indecent searching out of the private lives and the past political beliefs of individuals.

Wendell Willkie

#39. AMANDA: I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives.

Noel Coward

#40. People are intrigued and fascinated, almost obsessed with the private lives of great public personalities.

Geoffrey Rush

#41. To be allowed, no, invited into the private lives of strangers, and to share their joys and fears, was a chance to exchange the Southern bitter wormwood for a cup of mead with Beowulf or a hot cup of tea and milk with Oliver Twist.

Maya Angelou

#42. I wish we could go back to the time when the private lives of our public figures were relevant only if they directly affected their public responsibilities.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#43. We want the people, in their private lives, to be completely free, and in today's world, having access to information and the right of free dialogue and the right to think freely is the right of all peoples, including the people of Iran.

Hassan Rouhani

#44. When it comes to family policies, you are dealing with very private issues. Still, my husband and I decided that we didn't want to make our private lives a matter of public discussion.

Kristina Schroder

#45. I think it's just too kinda juicy and compelling to imagine people in their private lives, but then half the time people's private lives are just so much more bizarre and Ted Haggard-like than you could ever imagine. It's almost hard to write fiction anymore.

Jerry Stahl

#46. I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

John Le Carre

#47. For me, the camera is like an entrance to the private lives of other people. And if you are curious like me, it is a fantastic tool.

Anders Petersen

#48. What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

Salman Rushdie

#49. The real power and test of our ministry (calling) is not in the pulpit or public arena, but in our private lives, our home.

Bernard Kelvin Clive

#50. That's why I'm not on social media. People are way too open about their private lives. I don't need to see pictures of what somebody had for lunch or hear about how difficult their last bowel movement was or see on a map where they were when either one happened.

Janet Evanovich

#51. For decades, the journalistic norm had been that the private lives of public officials remained private unless that life impinged on public performance.

Roger Mudd

#52. Let's get the government stay out of our private lives, once and for all, and stop arresting smokers. Let's take a stand for personal freedom.

Willie Nelson

#53. We all have a right to our private lives; it's living a secret life that gets us in trouble.

Ellen Crosby

#54. The storm in our private lives had picked him up and put him out of place. Me, too. I, too, had been picked up from one place and set down in another. I, too, had been stranded. We both needed help resettling.

E.L. Konigsburg

#55. For years now I have been talking about personal responsibility and accountability, both in our private lives and in the halls of government. Those are important principles here in Idaho, and they will form the basis of this administration.

Butch Otter

#56. This attempt to ban smoking is an example of social engineering on a vast scale. Such massive intervention in the private lives and choices of one quarter of our adult population recalls the extremism of Prohibition, the last national crusade against a supposed social evil.

Charles Orville Whitley

#57. In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.

Terry Eagleton

#58. There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.

Philip K. Dick

#59. Horse People may be heads of state or professionally unemployed in their private lives, but horses are their passion, as Jerusalem was the passion of the soldier in some ancient crusade. The cult of the horse as their idol is as central to their lives as cocaine is to some and applause is to others.

Judith Krantz

#60. Do not regulate the private lives of people because, if you do, they will become angry and antisocial, and they will get what they want from criminals who work in perfect freedom because they know how to pay off the police.

Gore Vidal

#61. A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's own life

Eric Hoffer

#62. I also believe that government has no business telling us how we should live our lives. I think our lifestyle choices should be left up to us. What we do in our private lives is none of the government's business. That position rules out the Republican Party for me.

Jesse Ventura

#63. If 300 million people were to offer up the details of their private lives, you would need to hire another 300 million people just to keep up.

Hasan M. Elahi

#64. Private lives are more important than public reputations.

G.K. Chesterton

#65. The siren song of redistribution of wealth by centralized government never ceases for those who seek irreversible and unusurpable control over the lives and liberties of private citizens.

Josh Jones

#66. The protection of private property does more than promote market efficiency; it enhances the level of human freedom in the most intimate and personal parts of our lives.

Richard Allen Epstein

#67. Americans are opting out of public venues like the playground and the sidewalk for private venues like the healthclub and the mall. We're living our lives inside one form of corporation or another.

Robert D. Kaplan

#68. The complete disregard for the camera's presence indicates its complete saturation in their lives. The subject neither notices nor seems to care that someone has been invited into their private moment.

Nan Goldin

#69. It was the comfort of knowing that she was not quite so strange, that there were other people who found delight in private challenges and quiet lives. People who lived in their thoughts as much as in the real, physical world.

Daphne Kalotay

#70. It's in those private times that we are refreshed, strengthened, and rejuvenated. It's then we can see our lives from God's perspective and discover what is really important. That's where we understand who it is we belong to and believe in.

Stormie O'martian

#71. The album is a thing that you can hang out with between shows. I think that it's really nice to give people something they can enjoy in a private situation or walking around, just as the soundtrack of their lives.

Alex Ebert

#72. The line between private and public lives is a fertile one for me. I've lived quite a public life, and it's the reason I have used well-known people in my work. I'm interested in what's going on beneath the facades they present to the world, taking them to a place which is uncomfortable.

Sam Taylor-Johnson

#73. When we, as young women, are given the space to read, the act becomes a happy, private corner we can return to for the rest of our lives. We develop this love of reading by turning to stories that speak to the most special, secret parts of us.

Lena Dunham

#74. Good economic theory must give the people the chance to use their talents to build their own lives. We must get away from the traditional route where the rich will do the business and the poor will depend on private or public charity.

Muhammad Yunus

#75. Isabel saw all their lives becoming history in units of days and nights so fatally private there was no one left for her to love.

Jim Harrison

#76. I was a country kid who went to a public school, and she was more of a middle-class girl who attended a private school. I was into hunting and fishing, and she liked drama and singing in the choir at school and church. Our lives up until that point were totally different.

Jase Robertson

#77. Think it's as though everyone has a small place inside themselves, maybe, a private bit that they keep to themselves. It's like a little fortress, where the most private part of you lives - maybe it's your soul, maybe just that bit that makes you yourself and not anyone else.

Diana Gabaldon

#78. Everyone lives three versions of themselves; a public life, a private life and a secret life.

Lauren Beukes

#79. Prepare a crossing party," snapped Horyse. "A single person to cross. Miss Abhorsen, here. And Sergeant, if you or Private Rahise so much as talk in your sleep about what you may have heard here, then you'll be on gravedigging fatigues for the rest of your lives!

Garth Nix

#80. We need to have a measure of love and freedom at all times, even with the ones we love much in our lives.

Auliq Ice

#81. I didn't want people to say: Stelios does everything on the cheap at work, and in private he lives in the lap of luxury. That's not me. I don't need those status symbols. I don't need a private jet either when I can go everywhere with Easy.

Stelios Haji-Ioannou

#82. I don't think anybody can claim success at any part of our lives, private or professional, if there are others that don't enjoy the same opportunities.

Jose Andres

#83. People have three lives: the public life, the private life and the secret life ...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#84. Are there aspects of our lives - things we do, feel and think - that we daren't confess, even to ourselves, even in the absolute privacy of our private record.

William Boyd

#85. Translating any insights I have for strangers' lives into positive action in my own has proved a challenge. While I've learned a lot about what everyone else is thinking, I fail miserably to use such knowledge in my private relationships.

Mariella Frostrup

#86. Private Benjamin lives next door but one to Bob Cryer from The Bill. I once saw him crouching down behind a sycamore tree and using his nose as an Allen Key to release a starving rat.

St John Morris

#87. Both my husband and I give a lot of ourselves in what we do because that is our public lives; but in my private life, I have an intrinsic right to be left alone.

Ashley Judd

#88. All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#89. I was a scared kid ... I think I was born a nervous wreck, and I think movies were one way to find a way transferring my own private horrors to everyone else's lives. It was less of an escape and more of an exorcism.

Steven Spielberg

#90. I get that some people just want to do work and keep their lives private. I think for me, it just felt like I needed to be open about who I am. It just felt like the right thing for me to do.

Evan Rachel Wood

#91. But the intimacy, the smallness, also made me feel shut out; and I found myself hurrying past the inviting little doorways with my head down, very aware of all the convivial Sunday-morning lives unrolling around me in private.

Donna Tartt

#92. I honestly believe that this is one of the greatest secrets to true peace of mind
a decent sense of values. We could annihilate 50 percent of all our worries at once if we would develop a sort of private gold standard
a gold standard of what things are worth to us in terms of our lives.

Dale Carnegie

#93. I've never been a person to share my private life, but I can help save lives.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

#94. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.

Annie Dillard

#95. I have a confession to make.
I hate voir dire.
I despise prying into other people's lives because I wouldn't want them prying into mine.

Paul Levine

#96. I responded that we needed a private sector to improve the market situation and make peoples lives easier.

Alexander Dubcek

#97. As we settle into 2013, I predict this: We'll see companies that promote this shift from private ownership thrive. More people will be able to access things they simply don't need to own, and they'll save money and live better, cleaner, green lives doing it.

Lynn Jurich

#98. By virtue of our private property society, we have disconnected individuals from the land. We have put them in high rises and asked them to live their lives in urban settings, disconnected from the land.

Adam Dell

#99. I want to interfere horribly in my friends' love lives and keep my own embarrassing and pathetic one private, is that so much to ask?

Sarah Rees Brennan

#100. I certainly feel my career was a great career because it inspired so many many people, literally hundreds of people to follow a new kind of life and to realize that they could make out and advance their own professional and private and social lives.

Katherine Dunham