'In private, a person says all sorts of things, slurs friends, uses coarse language, acts silly, tells dirty jokes, repeats himself, makes a companion laugh by shocking him with outrageous talk, floats heretical ideas he'd never admit in public and so forth...but that we act differently in private from the way we do in public is everyone's most conspicuous experience; it is the very ground of the life of the individual. Curiously, this obvious fact remains unconscious, unacknowledged, forever obscured by lyrical dreams of the transparent glass house, it is rarely understood to be the value one must defend beyond all others. Private and public are two essentially different worlds and respect for that difference is the indispensable condition for a man to live free. The curtain is not to be tampered with, and curtain rippers are criminals. When it becomes the custom and the rule to divulge another person's private life, we are enntering a time when the highest stake is the survival or the disappearance of the individual.'
Milan Kundera, New York Review of Books, September 1995