Quotes on Innocence

Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.

In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed, America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence.

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.

We can all pretend to be cynical and scheming, but when we’re faced with purity and innocence, the cynical mask drops off.

Studio chief Winfield Sheehan wanted me to remain a little girl. If I lost my innocence, he said, it would show in my eyes.

It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke - that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

The most sophisticated people I know - inside they are all children.

I think that when you emigrate, when everything you took for granted disappears, it's a kind of loss of innocence. When you're a kid, the world as you know it is just there. Suddenly, you emigrate and that's no longer the case. It's a break in reality that parachutes you into adulthood.

They've done it before and they'll do it again and when they do it -- seems that only the children weep. Good night.

So many times I've photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet - to see the innocence.

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.

When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.

People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes.

Every harlot was a virgin once.

The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the Virgin Mary became pregnant when the Holy Spirit whispered in her ear. The idea that ears were vaginas. That, hearing just one wrong idea, you lost your innocence. One detail too many and you’d be ruined. Overdosed on information.

I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.

Where I live, nobody who's fourteen is having sex and doing major drugs. And I think if you see it in the movies, you may be influenced by it. I think it's so important to preserve your innocence.

Love, the most generous passion of the mind _x000D_ The softest refuge innocence can find