Secrecy Quotes

Two may keep counsel putting one away!

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.

Let not the right side of your brain know what the left side doeth.

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

Though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.

To keep your actions and your plans secret always has been a very good thing . .. Marcus Crassus said to one who asked him when he was going to move the army: 'Do you believe that you will be the only one not to hear the trumpet?

You cannot hide any secret. If the artist succor his flagging spirits by opium or wine, his work will characterize itself as the effect of opium or wine. If you make a picture or a statue, it sets the beholder in that state of mind you had when you made it. If you spend for show, on building, or gardening, or on pictures, or on equipages, it will so appear. We are all physiognomists and penetrators of character, and things themselves are detective.

It is given to few persons to keep this secret well. Those who lay down rules too often break them, and the safest we are able to give is to listen much, to speak little, and to say nothing that that will ever give ground or regret.

Nonviolence abhors fear and therefore, secrecy.

We easily forget our faults when no one knows them but ourselves.

Secrecy destroys accountability.

The only people who don't want to disclose the truth are the people with something to hide.

There are things I cannot say.

Everyone agrees that a secret should be kept intact, but everyone does not agree as to the nature and importance of secrecy. Too often we consult ourselves as to what we should say, what we should leave unsaid. There are few permanent secrets, and the scruple against revealing them will not last forever.

Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.

Proclaim not all though knowest, or all though owest.

. . . it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.

There are two kinds of stories, the ones you live and the ones you make up. And nobody knows the difference, and I don't ever tell which is which.

I have ways of making money that you know nothing of.

Nothing is so contrary to military rules as to make the strength of your army known, either in the orders of the day, in proclamations, or in the newspapers.