"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;"
— Alexander Pope

"A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity."
— Germaine Greer

"He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music."
— Mark Helprin (Winter's Tale)

"The most sophisticated people I know - inside they are all children. "
— Jim Henson

"When we are children we seldom think about 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."
— Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind)

"They've done it before and they'll do it again and when they do it -- seems that only the children weep. Good night."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being."
— Albert Camus (The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt)

"'I'm not...' Angharad began, but then she thought. Not what? Not a bad person? Perhaps. But had she never known anger? Never held unkind thoughts? The stranger's observation was valid. No one was innocent of darkness."
— Charles de Lint (Into the Green)

"Say I feel all sad and self-indulgent, then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spirtual pain once more - 'damn you tiny assain, clad in yellow and black, how i crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial'."
— Russell Brand Articles of Faith

"It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't."
— Mignon McLaughlin (Lucky In Love Greeting Card)

"Children are innocent and love justice while most adults are wicked and prefer mercy."
— G.K. Chesterton

"I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and most self- absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they're sleeping. For me there's no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.

"
— Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)

"It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us."
— Ian McEwan (Black Dogs)

"Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door."
— William Blake (Songs of Innocence And of Experience)

"There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws."
— Ayn Rand

"It's better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one."
— Voltaire

"In their innocence, very young children know themselves to be light and love. If we will allow them, they can teach us to see ourselves the same way. "
— Michael Jackson

"Parents can only give [children] good advice or put them on their right paths, but the final forming of a person lies in their own hands."
— Anne Frank

"During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me. Remarkably, according to what they told me, nearly every inmate in the prison didn't do it. Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison.

On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody."
— Alan Alda (Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned)

"...the cold winds of insecurity... hadn't shredded the dreamy chrysalis of his childhood. He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him; he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly's unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting; that is, they ache until they atrophy."
— Harold Brodkey

"There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"And that's what innocence is. It's simple and trusting like a child, not judgmental and committed to one narrow point of view. If you are locked into a pattern of thinking and responding, your creativity gets blocked. You miss the freshness and magic of the moment. Learn to be innocent again, and that freshness never fades."
— Michael Jackson

"Unschuld ist kein Schutz."
— Thomas Fuller

"Perowne, born the year before the Suez crisis, too young for the Cuban missiles, or the construction of the Berlin Wall, or Kennedy’s assassination, remembers being tearful over Aberfan in ‘sixty-six — one hundred and sixteen schoolchildren just like himself, fresh from prayers in school assembly, the day before half-term, buried under a sea of mud. This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo’s sincerely godless generation, the question hasn’t come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There’s no entity for him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quickly. These days he scans the papers for fresh developments the way he might a listings magazine. As long as there’s nothing new, his mind is free. International terror, security cordons, preparations for war — these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds."
— Ian McEwan (Saturday)

"The law does not expect a man to be prepared to defend every act of his life which may be suddenly and without notice alleged against him."
— John Marshall

"Dalgliesh was too experienced to assume that fear implied guilt; it was often the most innocent who were the most terrified."
— P.D. James (The Lighthouse)

"I want to get out of here means I want to be innocent."
— Kathy Acker (My Mother: Demonology)