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Anonymity Quotes

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Anonymity Quotes

“We were alone together for three days, we knew no one in the city, I could be anyone, say anything, do anything. I felt like a war prisoner who's suddenly been released by an invading army and told that he can start heading home now, no forms to fill out, no debriefing, no questions asked, no buses, no gate passes, no clean clothes to stand in line for—just start walking.”

FreedomFeelingFreeSimileAnonymityCall Me By Your NameAndre AcimanAlone Together
Book:Call Me by Your Name
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“People who want to be famous don't know what they're getting into. Once I got famous I saw a side of humanity I'd never seen before. People who don't even know your work want to glom onto you just because you are famous. It's a nauseating aspect of human nature that people worship power -- that's one of the things about mankind that I find truly reprehensible.”

Human NatureFameAnonymityFame And Notability
Book:R. Crumb: Conversations by R. Crumb
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“On the late afternoon streets, everyone hurries along, going about their own business. Who is the person walking in front of you on the rain-drenched sidewalk? He is covered with an umbrella, and all you can see is a dark coat and the shoes striking the puddles. And yet this person is the hero of his own life story. He is the love of someone’s life. And what he can do may change the world. Imagine being him for a moment. And then continue on your own way.”

PeopleLifeSelfHeroRainStrangerStoryHeroesStrangersAnonymityAnonymous
Book:The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
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“At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through--and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one's own alienation. It suggests itself as an ideal location for Christmas lunch for those let down by their families.”

TravelDisappointmentAlienationAnonymityCafeteriaDinerMotorways
Book:The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
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“The dispersion of the daimonic by means of impersonality has serious and destructive effects. In New York City, it is not regarded as strange that the anonymous human beings secluded in single-room occupancies are so often connected with violent crime and drug addiction. Not that the anonymous individual in New York is alone: he sees thousands of other people every day, and he knows all the famous personalities as they come, via TV, into his single room. He knows their names, their smiles, their idiosyncrasies; they bandy about in a “we're-all-friends-together” mood on the screen which invites him to join them and subtly assumes that he does join them. He knows them all. But he himself is never known. His smile is unseen; his idiosyncrasies are important to no-body; his name is unknown. He remains a foreigner pushed on and off the subway by tens of thousands of other anonymous foreigners. There is a deeply depersonalizing tragedy involved in this. The most severe punishment Yahweh could inflict on his people was to blot out their name. “Their names,” Yahweh proclaims, “shall be wiped out of the book of the living.” This anonymous man's never being known, this aloneness, is transformed into loneliness, which may then become daimonic possession. For his self-doubts—“I don't really exist since I can't affect anyone” —eat away at his innards; he lives and breathes and walks in a loneliness which is subtle and insidious. It is not surprising that he gets a gun and trains it on some passer-by—also anonymous to him. And it is not surprising that the young men in the streets, who are only anonymous digits in their society, should gang together in violent attacks to make sure their assertion is felt. Loneliness and its stepchild, alienation, can become forms of demon possession. Surrendering ourselves to the impersonal daimonic pushes us into an anonymity which is also impersonal; we serve nature’s gross purposes on the lowest common denominator, which often means with violence.”

LonelinessAlienationAnonymityExistential Psychology
Book:Love and will
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“I fucking romanticize the idea of disappearing forever. I don’t mean checking out early, pulling a Hemingway with the shotgun, leaving a mess for the maid and a legacy for the critics to pick over like vultures on a roadside carcass. That’s too final. That’s too loud. I’m talking about the fade out. The slow dissolve. I’m talking about the Great Vanishing Act.”

FreedomExistenceSolitudeEscapismAnonymityDigital DetoxThe Great VanishThe Slow DissolveModern NoirGhost Mode
Book:Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”
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“I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.”

FamilyMiseryGenocideExtinctionAngstShort StoriesBorn AgainAnonymitySurvivorsNazisRwandaClean SlateGermansSigns And SymbolsRwandan GenocideNabokov
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“This was his first trip on the Ossifar Distana, his first real splash in life. Look what it got him. Mister Smiff liked anonymity. He kept a low profile, often traveling under assumed names, claiming to be anything from a banker to a (very) successful life insurance salesman. He’d never broken the law, at least not irreparably. He was quite generous, well liked, sponsoring many charities anonymously – which is why it was so surprising to find him floating face down in the private spa in his apartment, murdered. He had been murdered, unless it was a freak shaving accident. Those old razors weren’t called cut-throats for nothing. Yikes.”

LifeLawNamesSuccessfulGenerousFreakSurprisingApartmentNothingOldNeverProfileSalesmanTravelingTheRazorsAnonymityNotToItLookWhatInWellAccidentForHimVeryThisSoOftenLikedClaimingUnlessMurderedYikesCharitiesHe DAnonymouslyDistanaIrreparablyOssifar
Book:Dead Man's Hammer
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“Apparently, if you look at how many numbers we're likely to store in our mobile phone, or how many names we're likely to list on a social networking site, it's rare even for city dwellers to exceed a couple of hundred. Social anthropologists delightedly point out that this is the size of the social group we would have had to handle in a large Stone Age village. According to them, we're all trying to cope with modern big-city life equipped only with a Stone Age social brain. We all struggle with anonymity.”

CommunityGroupsNetworkingAnthropologyAnonymitySocializingStone Age
Book:A History of the World in 100 Objects
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“As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter—an internal warning system that signals caution about journalism that doesn't feel trustworthy. Sometimes it's a quote or incident that's too perfect —a feeling I always had when reading stories by Stephen Glass in the New Republic. Sometimes it's too many errors of fact, the overuse of anonymous sources, or signs that a reporter hasn't dealt fairly with people or evidence. And sometimes it's a combination of flaws that produces a ring of falsity, the whiff of a bad egg. There's no journalist who sets off my bullshit alarm like Ron Suskind.”

JournalismFairnessBullshitEditingObjectivityAnonymityFact CheckingNew RepublicRon SuskindStephen Glass
Author:Jacob Weisberg
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“A man I used to love died in a hospital alone. We had grown apart and lost touch. I met a common friend one day at a bar and he told me about my ex-lover. Nobody claimed the body for two weeks: His parents refused, his only sister could not be found, and the hospital was certainly not going to release the body to his AA sponsor. So after two weeks they cremated him like all the other unclaimed bodies, put his ashes into a jar, and then allowed anyone to take it. But no one did. He was buried by the municipality in an unmarked grave. I drove to the cemetery. He was buried in Lot 12, Block 86, Section D. Incredibly precise locations for a person who is nothing but ashes unclaimed.”

DeathAnonymityQueer Politics
Book:Burden of Ashes
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“I dont want anybody talking about me. To say where I was or what I said when I was there. I mean, you could talk about me maybe. But nobody could say that it was me. I could be anybody. I think in times like these the less said the better. If something had happened and we were survivors and we met on the road then we'd have something to talk about. But we're not. So we dont.”

ForgottenDisappearIsolationApocalypseAnonymityHermitDrop Out
Book:The Road
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“New York was like the internet before the internet. A densely populated, hectic, ever-evolving place that’s always on, that you extract yourself from in order to rest, to catch your breath, and will be there in full force when you’re ready for it again. The city that never sleeps. Interconnected in a grand plexus by a series of subnetworks and subsystems. Shiny parts and seedy parts. Covered in ads, understated and overstated. Multicultural. Everybody’s here, every language is spoken. The anonymous mistaken for the rude: people here get away with saying how they feel, speaking their truths.”

TruthNew YorkAdvertisingMulticulturalismAnalogiesAnonymityRudenessNycLanguagesThe Internet
Book:In Limbo
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“Modernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences.”

LifeTechnologyDesignPersonalityUniquenessAnonymityPersonalization
Book:The Blind Giant
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“The difference between a vigilante and a reformer is that a vigilante with their half-baked and insecure notions of justice feels compelled to hide their identity, whereas a reformer has nothing to hide, for a reformer knows, no lasting reform can be brought through anonymity. If you have something to say, say it, and stand by it with your last breath. Doctors save lives, and they have family, yet they don’t hide behind anonymity. Soldiers and cops defend lives, and they have family, yet they don’t hide behind anonymity. Scientists save the world, and they have family, yet they don’t hide behind anonymity. Then what makes a vigilante so special that they have to keep their identity a secret! You don’t need a secret identity to serve the world. You just need to stand up with accountability against the most distressing troubles faced by society, and your very name will turn into an immortal symbol, that will send a shockwave of courage and inspiration through countless generations to come.”

Social JusticeService Of HumanityPublic ServiceAnonymitySocial ReformerHuman Rights ActivistVigilanteFight For Freedom
Book:Either Reformist or Terrorist: If You Are Terror I Am Your Grandfather
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“Kierkegaard disparages the irresponsibility afforded by the modern press which allows people to address the crowd in an arena where public opinion has become the hallmark of truth, but in which the opinion-formers remain hidden. Everyone seeks anonymity--in the press, in the crowd, to the point where everyone is no one! ,”

IdentityInternetSecretsAnonymityThe Press
Book:Kierkegaard's Critique of Christian Nationalism
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