Quotes About Innocence

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.

But when you're writing a script - for me anyway - you have to sort of create an enforced innocence. You have to divest yourself of worrying about a lot of stuff like what movies are hot, what movies are not hot, what the budget of this movie might be.

Children are amazing, and while I go to places like Princeton and Harvard and Yale, and of course I teach at Columbia, NYU, and that's nice and I love students, but the most fun of all are the real little ones, the young ones.

OCR [US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights] also states that a "school should also ensure that hearings are conducted in a manner that does not inflict additional trauma on the complainant", which implies that the school should not start the proceedings with a presumption of innocence, or even a stance of neutrality. Rather, university officials should assume that any complaint is valid and the accused is guilty as charged.

It was a tough break. Parry was innocent. On top of that he was a decent sort of guy who never bothered people and wanted to lead a quiet life. But there was too much on the other side and on his side of it there was practically nothing. The judge handed him a life sentence and he was taken to San Quentin.

Under the blanket the outline of her body was slender and displayed a certain innocence, a precious quality far more significant than the elegance of her form. She seemed to radiate kindness and essential goodness, and Darby, trying to measure the value of her, told himself it was immeasurable.

Jim Cooper, a former LAPD officer turned sociologist, has observed that the overwhelming majority of those who end up getting beaten or otherwise brutalized by police turn out to be innocent of any crime. "Cops don't beat up burglars," he writes. The reason, he explained, is simple: the one thing most guaranteed to provoke a violent reactions from police is a challenge to their right to, as he puts is, "define the situation." (p. 80)

What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they're actually more imaginative than we are?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau left us a story about the origins of social inequality that continues to be told and retold, in endless variations, to this day. It is the story of humanity's original innocence, and unwitting departure from a state fo pristine simplicity on a voyage of technological discovery that would ultimately guarantee both our 'complexity' and our enslavement. How did this ambivalent story of civilization come about?

The racist denigration of the savage, and naive celebration of savage innocence, are always treated as two sides of the same imperialist coin.

soulsThat we might break these molds And free our restless souls Start to believe That we can rise above Our pettiness and love Like we ain't loved before Free on this earth As the surf that rolls And crashes on the shore And hey now don't run and hide Your little heart away If it's gone We'll sure never find it Pining for lost innocence Tantalisingly I saw Our shadows moving through the door Traces from a different time When I was yours and you were truly mine All mine

and I discovered my limitations, and mainly I learned that there was a price to pay for that childhood (it turns out there's no such thing as a free starvation), and that in the meantime the world had filled up with other children who hadn't wasted all their strength on just surviving but had simply grown and opened and deepened, and that only in her innocent eyes could I still be considered worth anything.

Naturally I compensated my inner insecurity by an outward show of security, or—to put it better—the defect compensated itself without the intervention of my will. That is, I found myself being guilty and at the same time wishing to be innocent.22

You could never prove innocence, not in the match with the man who only had to imply guilt.

When you're a kid, and you first start reading grown-up books, it's like looking in a window at night at people who think no one is around.

When things go wrong in a child's world, children believe it is their fault. They believe there is something they should have done or perhaps something they can do that will fix it. The problem with that belief is that it is a lie.

I mean no disrespect to the gentlemen of the bench, but it is no secret that our system of justice, praised throughout Europe for its severity and its swiftness, is a terrible and fearful thing, and no man, guilty or innocent, wishes to stand before it.

My own people persuaded the Bagenya not to sell a canoe: Hassani knows it all, but swears that he did not join in the slander, and even points up to Heaven in attestation of innocence of all, even of Manilla's foray. Mohamadans are certainly famous as liars, and the falsehood of Mohamad has been transmitted to his followers in a measure unknown in other religions.

I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old. I am sixty. I am six. I am there.

No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.

Every child born into the world is a new thought of God, an ever-fresh and radiant possibility.

God wants a child's heart and a grownup's head.

Christ is the very epitome of innocence, and without the blood of Christ, shed on Calvary, God's plan of salvation would not have been fulfilled.

I have two young children with autism. What could they have ever done to deserve that? What kind of a God allows the innocent to suffer? It's a mystery. Yet still, I believe in God.