Secrecy is as indispensable to human beings as fire, and as greatly feared.
Interpretation
Secrecy is a fundamental aspect of human nature that is both essential and often feared.
This quote by Sissela Bok highlights the dual role of secrecy in human life. While it is a necessary tool for personal autonomy and protection, it also elicits fear due to its potential for misuse and the unknowns it can create in relationships and society. Secrecy can provide safety, akin to fire, but it also has the capacity to harm if wielded irresponsibly.
In practice
In a discussion about privacy, one might say, 'As Sissela Bok reminds us, secrecy is indispensable to human beings as fire.'
I believe that a guarantee of public access to government information is indispensable in the long run for any democratic society.... if officials make public only what they want citizens to know, then publicity becomes a sham and accountability meaningless.
To mature is in part to realize that while complete intimacy and omniscience and power cannot be had, self-transcendence, growth, and closeness to others are nevertheless within one's reach.
Liars share with those they deceive the desire not to be deceived.
Trust is a social good to be protected just as much as the air we breathe or the water we drink. When it is damaged, the community as a whole suffers; and when it is destroyed, societies falter and collapse
Are people the best judges of their own happiness, or outsiders? In defining happiness, should we think of entire lives or of shorter periods such as moments, days, or years? And to what extent are virtue and happiness linked?
We are all, in a sense, experts on secrecy. From earliest childhood we feel its mystery and attraction. We know both the power it confers and the burden it imposes. We learn how it can delight, give breathing space and protect.
Man, in spite of his fatal degradation, bears always the evident marks of his divine origin, in that every universal belief is always more or less true.
He that is strucken blind can not forget the precious treasure of his eyesight lost.
A man who has no office to go, to I don't care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.
What we call generosity is for the most part only the vanity of giving; and we exercise it because we are more fond of that vanity than of the thing we give.
Variant: When it is not in our power to follow what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.
We know what works. Freedom Works. We know what's right. Freedom is right.
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