Quotes & Sayings About Children's Innocence

Their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel on the wind, and enter the souls of animals. — Mark Helprin

Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing
by dint of ignorance and innocence
that beneath this unbearable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way. — Gregory Maguire

The qualities that make for excellence in children's literature can be summed up in a single word: imagination. And imagination as it relates to the child is, to my mind, synonymous with fantasy. Contrary to most of the propaganda in books for the young, childhood is only partly a time of innocence. It is, in my opinion, a time of seriousness, bewilderment, and a good deal of suffering. It's also possibly the best of all times. Imagination for the child is the miraculous, freewheeling device he uses to course his way through the problems of every day ... It's through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. — Maurice Sendak

I'm going to tell you something that no magazine or novel or television show will ever let on. Love wears you down. We think of it as hearts and flowers and happily ever after but in real life, the things you have to do in the name of love kill you ... You end up doing a thousand things in a day in the name of love that you wouldn't ask a dog to do.
Sex is the most powerful weapon in your arsenal
innocence is attractive in children, but it makes brittle, disappointed adults.
Someone liking you is just the beginning; it always starts nicely but before you know it it's like Persephone being dragged into the Underworld.
Romantic love is an illusion Hughie,. It can be manupulated, twisted, piled up like a bunch of fun-house mirrors. The very nature of it is deceptive. It promises closeness but the only thing is ever really reveals is the dreams and fears of the person with the obsessions. That's why it's so easy to control — Kathleen Tessaro

For long minutes we cried, our grief inconsolable. We mourned the innocence of our childhood love; we grieved as parents of our own children. We agonized in the unfairness of the haphazard and tumultuous world we'd been pushed out into through our mothers' flesh. We wept for the first time, one among many firsts we'd shared, for the sheer emotional pain of bedrock loss. — Larry J. Dunlap

Many children fly like birds, guess other people's dreams, and speak with ghosts, but ... they all outgrow it when they lose their innocence. — Isabel Allende

That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped. — J.K. Rowling

A white male child of perfect innocence and intelligence makes the most suitable victim. — Aleister Crowley

It's never too late to have a happy childhood. — Tom Robbins

It used to be that parents didn't have to be home. If a neighbor so I child misbehaving, it was considered appropriate for the neighbor to intervene. The parents would be grateful when they found out, and they would take the word of the neighbor if the child protested his innocence.

Unmarried and divorced parents tend not to behave that way. Instead, they tend to try to be the good guy to their children. — Charles Murray

Meditation is the art of cleaning your mirror from all the dust that the society, the religion, the educational system has poured on you, to take away everything that has not been born with you, to bring you to your absolute innocence as you were born as a child. — Rajneesh

There's this assumption that all children have the luxury of a childhood where their innocence is always respected and their main occupation is pleasant play - at the age of 18 or 21, they are then thrust into the real world and shown its uglier side, but not before. — Margo Lanagan

Innocence ain't all it's cracked up to be, you know. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don't know any better. That's innocence. — Joe Hill

When Aziza first spotted Mariam in the morning, her eyes always sprang open, and she began mewling and squirming in her mother's grip. She thrust her arms toward Mariam, demanding to be held, her tiny hands opening and closing urgently, on her face a look of both adoration and quivering anxiety ...
"Why have you pinned your little heart to an old, ugly hag like me?" Mariam would murmur into Aziza's hair ... "What have I got to give you?"
But Aziza only muttered contentedly and dug her face in deeper. And when she did that, Mariam swooned. Her eyes watered. Her heart took flight. And she marveled at how, after all these years of rattling loose, she had found in this little creature the first true connection in her life of false, failed connections. — Khaled Hosseini

And the sun on the wall of her room, the block of sun with all the tiny flying things in it. When she was little she thought they were the souls of dead insects, still buzzing in the light. — Tim Winton

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. — W.B.Yeats

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

But I think parents aren't teachers anymore. Parents
or a whole lot of us, at least
lead by mouth instead of by example. It seems to me that if a child's hero is their mother or father
or even better, both of them in tandem
then the rough road of learning and experience is going to be smoothed some. And every little bit of smoothing helps, in this rough old world that wants children to be miniature adults, devoid of charm and magic and the beauty of innocence. — Robert McCammon

Say what you will, dear sister, we do what we do for the promise of our youth. Yet it is always they who scar beneath the points of daggers. — Chris Galford

A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly. — Heather O'Neill

I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there. — Donna Tartt

Children used to be unknowing and innocent when it came to certain issues in life. But that innocence has been lost in today's electronic environment. Kids are exposed to ideas and content their minds and emotions are not ready to handle. And under the onslaught of this corrupt world with its wrong concepts, wrong desires, wrong deeds, and wrong attitudes, children come under all sorts of negative influences that end up bringing serious problems into the home. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

Ah, Monsieur Priest, you love not the crudities of the true. Christ loved them. He seized a rod and cleared out the Temple. His scourge, full of lightnings, was a harsh speaker of truths. When he cried, 'Sinite parvulos,' he made no distinction between the little children. It would not have embarrassed him to bring together the Dauphin of Barabbas and the Dauphin of Herod. Innocence, Monsieur, is its own crown. Innocence has no need to be a highness. It is as august in rags as in fleurs de lys. — Victor Hugo

Zen says that if you drop knowledge - and within knowledge everything is included; your name, your identity, everything, because this has been given to you by others - if you drop all that has been given by others, you will have a totally different quality to your being: innocence. This will be a crucifixion of the persona, the personality, and there will be a resurrection of your innocence. You will become a child again, reborn. — Rajneesh

I must say that my father is innocent. I should say it. I have to say it. I'm obliged to say it. My father will kill me if I don't say he is innocent. The children of murderers cannot kill the father. — Alejandro Zambra

Because glamour mythically opposes death and decay its ideal model of perfection is youth. The features of youth dictate many of the facets of glamour's criteria. Small snub noses, fair hair, smooth featureless skin, innocence, Picturing youth as a target of sexual lust inevitably encourages the sexual abuse of children. — Stefan Szczelkun

The thing I deplore the most is, anyone who rapes anyone's innocence, in anyway. So a guy who physically rapes a woman or a child or physically hits a child. When that period of innocence is raped - that person loses something that they can never get it back. To me when innocence is raped, that is the sickest and filthiest thing. — Kelly Cutrone

Children aren't only less inhibited than adults; they are also less powerful, and smaller too. They may or may not be more open-minded and liberated than grown-ups, but they are forced to live in a world that wasn't designed for them, and one that is not primarily concerned with their desires and their welfare. And so children are constantly compromising, constantly adjusting to an environment that is clearly not theirs, not yet. That's wisdom, not innocence. — Ian Bogost

There's nothing more contagious than the laughter of young children; it doesn't even have to matter what they're laughing about. — Criss Jami

I know you have the capability to understand right from wrong because you hate people who harm children. Well, why not despise people who harm animals? It's hypocritical! Why protect one and violate the other when neither one wants or deserves the abuse? They just wish it would end. Stop praising the innocence in children then ignoring or making fun of the innocence in animals. — Gary Yourofsky

Soul murder, the psychiatrists call it, the sexual violation of children. Unimaginably small boys. Boys whose heads do not reach to their father's waists. Girls who are no more than infants. Boys and girls whose lives are ineradicably violated. Whose trust and innocence are lost to them forever. (208) — Robert Goolrick

All life-forms are innocent, but man is the greatest innocent life-form that the universe has ever produced.
Man is never created bad, as some primitive "revelations" claim.
Man is both all-capable, and innocent;
Man cannot have better attributes than the ones he already has.
Once we defeat scarcity, the factor that has forced all our negative attributes into existence will be no more.
Man's nature is forged by scarcity.
Man is a child of scarcity.
Some men may currently live in abundance, even obscene abundance, but they still are the children of scarcity.
We all are. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

So much of what a pet is about for us is that it becomes a vessel for yearnings, dreams, illusions, hopes and so forth. It's a projection of the ultimate innocence and purity. That's why it's hard to see a dog in its dogness. That's why, when some harm comes to a dog, it's much harder for an audience to deal with that, more so than dealing with harm that comes to a child or anything human. — Todd Solondz

Life is a mystery; that means it cannot be solved. And when all efforts to solve it prove futile, the mystery dawns upon you. Then the doors are open; then you are invited. As a knower, nobody enters the divine; as a child, ignorant, not knowing at all- the mystery embraces you. With a knowing mind you are clever, not innocent. Innocence is the door. — Rajneesh

We try to bring up our children so that they are protected from the world's evils, only to find we've raised a pack of innocents who seem to be about to stumble into them at every turn just from sheer stupidity! — Samuel R. Delany

A "race to innocence" is what occurs when individuals assume that they are innocent of complicity in structures of domination and oppression.25 This concept captures the understandable assumption made by new immigrants or children of recent immigrants to any country. They cannot be responsible, they assume, for what occurred in their adopted country's past. Neither are those who are already citizens guilty, even if they are descendants of slave owners, Indian killers, or Andrew Jackson himself. Yet, in a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behavior of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Children, Never look Back! and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles. — Milan Kundera

He jerked his head at Dill: 'Things haven't caught up with that one's instinct yet. Let him get a little older and he won't get sick and cry. Maybe things'll strike him as being- not quite right, say, but he won't cry, not when he gets a few years on him.'
'Cry about what, Mr. Raymond?' Dill's maleness was beginning to assert itself.
'Cry about the simple hell people give each other- without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they're people too.
A reflection on the innocence and vulnerability of children — Harper Lee

Childhood has been idealised as a lost garden paradise to which we can never return. We are excluded from this world of carelessness, innocence and unity. But the imaginary kingdom is nothing more than a projection of adult ideas and concerns onto the image, an expression of our own yearnings. By photographing children alone, divorced from any social setting, I allow them to exist on their own ... I am exploring the equivocal connection between self and world. — Loretta Lux

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence. — Donna Tartt

When children's innocence is used as a tactic to suppress queer adults, readers need to resist, not children, but those who conscript children to fight their own ideological agendas. — Tison Pugh

Parents don't want their children to lose that purity and innocence of childhood. We want to bottle that and hold onto that, but it's impossible. — Pete Docter

"A son," I say, recalling every detail of the child's perfect face.
Ivory's smile is blinding. "A most unique creature. The first child to be born to two netherlings who've shared a childhood. Wonderland is founded on chaos, madness, and magic. For so long, innocence and imagination have had no place there. As a result, we haven't had children, at least by your world's definition. And because of this, we've lost the ability to dream. But Morpheus experienced those things via you, each time you played together in your dreams. Through your child, Wonderland will thrive with new magic and strength. Our offspring will become true children once more; they will learn to dream again. And all will be right with our world. — A.G. Howard

The magic, the wonder, the mystery and the innocence of a child's heart are the seeds of creativity that will heal the world. — Michael Jackson

What I liked about it is in the world of children, there are very, very different rules and a kind of naivete and innocence and sweetness that's been beautifully captured, I think, by this film as you can even see [gesturing toward the film's poster on display nearby] from this gorgeous artwork. — Russell Brand

DOSTIE: Let's be honest here. People? Sometimes they suck. But kids, well, they're like a new snowfall, you know? — Hillary DePiano

Katie heard the story. 'It's come at last,' she thought, 'the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn't enough food in the house you pretended you weren't hungry so they could have more. In the cold of a winter's night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn't be cold. You'd kill anyone who tried to harm them ... Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you'd give your life to spare them. — Betty Smith

Earthly authority displays itself in giving orders, in magnificent apparel, in hordes of servitors, in sycophantic addresses; the authority of Jesus disposes of is, by contrast, spiritual, and expresses itself in serving, not being served, in seeking to be the least instead of the greatest, the last instead of the first, in finding wisdom in the innocence of children and truth in the foolishness of men rather than in those who pass for being sagacious and experienced in the world's ways. When we want to adulate men, we say they are godlike; but when God became Man, it was in the lineaments of the least of men. — Malcolm Muggeridge

You sentimentalise them because they're little," she said. "But the format doesn't matter. I have gradually learned that everyone, absolutely everyone of every size, is out to get something. People want things. It comes to them naturally. Of course they get more skilful with age, and they're no longer so disarmingly obvious, but the goal doesn't change. Your children simply haven't had time to learn how it's done. That's what we call innocence. — Tove Jansson

For a moment he said nothing, then he reached over and traced a line down her cheek with his finger. When a man looks into a woman's eyes, lass, he doesna want to see the horrors he has kent written there. He wants to see joy and warmth and some measure of innocence. Tis the natural duty and desire of a man to protect his woman and children from the world's bitterness. — Pamela Clare

We must abandon the goals of perfect obedience and untainted innocence and begin to equip our children to see their place in God's family, their need for his grace, and their opportunity to embrace his mission. — Mark Matlock

I bought my first camera to photograph my brother's children. I learned a lot from that experience. The value of innocence and of not being focused on yourself, and I have to say that these things have remained with me to this day. I can immediately feel when someone is putting on a camera face. — Peter Lindbergh

The room smells of lemon oil, heavy cloth, fading daffodils, the leftover smells of cooking that have made their way from the kitchen or the dining room, and of Serena Joy's perfume: Lily of the Valley. Perfume is a luxury, she must have some private source. I breathe it in, thinking I should appreciate it. It's the scent of pre-pubescent girls, of the gifts young children used to give their mothers, for Mother's Day; the smell of white cotton socks and white cotton petticoats, of dusting powder, of the innocence of female flesh not yet given over to hairiness and blood. It makes me feel slightly ill, as it I'm in a closed car on a hot muggy day with an older woman wearing too much face powder. This is what the sitting room is like, despite its elegance. — Margaret Atwood

That's most interesting. But I was no more a mind-reader then than today. I
was weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More
scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a
harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not
remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I've never forgotten. — Kazuo Ishiguro

Is anyone in the U.S. innocent? Although those at the very pinnacle of the economic pyramid gain the most, millions of us depend - either directly or indirectly - on the exploitation of the LDCs for our livelihoods. The resources and cheap labor that feed nearly all our businesses come from places like Indonesia, and very little ever makes its way back. The loans of foreign aid ensure that today's children and their grandchildren will be held hostage. They will have to allow our corporations to ravage their natural resources and will have to forego education, health, and other social services merely to pay us back. The fact that our own companies already received most of this money to build the power plants, airports, and industrial parks does not factor into this formula. Does the excuse that most Americans are unaware of this constitute innocence? Uninformed and intentionally misinformed, yes - but innocent? — John Perkins

Children are the most reasonable about discipline. When they tell you not to do something, it's always because they know why. — Criss Jami

Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a child's life in Oxford. Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and charming? — Philip Pullman

Childhood is perhaps the only phase of life when innocence can flourish. But to allow this, parents and others responsible for children's minds needs to construct a protective shelter against the painful and frightening facets of life. They need to stand guard at its door, to let the harsher truths of reality gradually unfold for the child, in a way and at a pace that allows the child to maintain a positive outlook. — Diane Medved

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say 'When I grow up,' there is always an edge of disbelief - how could they ever be other than what they are? — Ian McEwan

Still, the facts are always there. Every teacher, every parent, every priest who serves this kind of neighborhood knows what these inequalities imply. So the sweetness of the moment loses something of its sweetness later on when you're reminded of the odds these children face and of the ways injustice slowly soils innocence. You wish you could eternalize these times of early glory. You wish that Elio and Ariel and Pineapple could stay here in this garden of their juvenile timidity forever. You know they can't. You have a sense of what's ahead. You do your best to shut it out. You want to know them as they are. You do not want to think too much of what may someday be. — Jonathan Kozol

Children are prophets of nature. — Raheel Farooq

What innocence, may I ask, is being played here when it is known that this virtuous damsel has already got a dozen illegitimate children? — Nikita Khrushchev

Nobody likes to let go of the ego- it is so precious to everyone. However, once you have attained a state of egolessness, the world won't disappear, as you may think it will. The world will continue, but a change takes place within you. Something is uncovered. You start seeing everything with the wonder and innocence of a child. — Mata Amritanandamayi

The artwork of children always broke Grace's heart. The pieces were like snapshots, a moment that is forever gone, a life-post, never to be repeated. Their artistic abilities will mature and change. The innocence will be gone, captured only in fingerpaint or coloring out of the lines, in uneven handwriting. — Harlan Coben

Have you ever heard a five-year-old recite the Pledge of Allegiance, Arthur? It's creepy as hell. Their enunciation is perfect, but they have no idea what kind of promise they're making, of what's being called for. No one tells you until later that breaking your words amounts to treason. No one tells you until later that you can't take it back. I was having my own treasonous thoughts as I drove. They were half formed, but went a little like this: asking something like that from a person ought not to be allowed. — Alyson Foster

Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary. And cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied.
Some people call the sunset a creation of extraordinary beauty, and proof of God's existence. But what benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit by choosing pink to light the path of a slave vessel? Do not be fooled by the pretty colour, and do not submit to its beckoning. — Lawrence Hill

The child's naive dream of life is the only one worth having. — Marty Rubin

She blinked, sat up, and saw Chris in the bathroom doorway. He'd just gotten out the shower. His hair was damp, and he was dressed only in his briefs. The sight of his thin, boyish body - all ribs and elbows and knees - pulled at her heart, for he looked so innocent and vulnerable. He was so small adn fragile that she wondered how she could ever protect him, and renewed fear rose in her. — Dean Koontz

Love. Children are loving, they dont gossip, they dont complain, theyre just open-hearted. Theyre ready for you. They dont judge. They dont see things by way of color. Theyre very child-like. Thats the problem with adults: they lose that child-like quality. And thats the level of inspiration thats so needed and is so important for creating and writing songs and for a sculptor, a poet or a novelist. Its that same kind of innocence, that same level of consciousness, that you create from. And kids have it. I feel it right away from animals and children and nature. Of course. — Michael Jackson

Our children are an integral component of our stories as we are of theirs and, therefore, each child acts as the knighted messengers to carry their forebears' stories into the future. To deprive our children of the narrative cells regarding the formation of the ozone layer that rims the atmosphere of our ancestors' saga and parental determination of selfhood is to deny them of the sacred right to claim the sanctity of their heritage. Accordingly, all wrinkled brow natives are chargeable with the sacrosanct obligation of telling their kith and kin the memorable story of the scenic days they spent as children of nature splashing about in their naked innocence in the brook of infinite time and space. We must scrupulous document our family's history as well as scrawl out our personal story. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I can remember being eight, and I like writing about that age of innocence when children still have a sense of wonder. — John Boyne

As children's inquiries are not to be slighted, so also great care is to be taken, that they never receive deceitful and illuding answers. They easily perceive when they are slighted or deceived, and quickly learn the trick of neglect, dissimulation, and falsehood, which they observe others to make use of. We are not to intrench upon truth in any conversation, but least of all with children; since, if we play false with them, we not only deceive their expectation, and hinder their knowledge, but corrupt their innocence, and teach them the worst of vices. — John Locke

It is necessary to reaffirm our solid opposition to any direct offense against life, especially when innocent and defenseless, and the unborn child in its mother's womb is the quintessence of innocence. Let us remember the words of Vatican Council II: 'Therefore from the moment of its conception life must be guarded with the greatest care while abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes.' — Pope Francis

The learned must educate the ignorant. Because, according to society, ignorance is never bliss. Except in retrospect. I look back upon my ignorance with the knowledge that I was much happier then than now. Consider this: children know precious little, but the profound ignorance comes from profound innocence. People really mean to say that innocence is bliss. And bliss is short-lived. — Nick Sagan

There is another more subtle way in which the innocence of childhood is lost: when the child is infected with the desire to become somebody. Contemplate the crowds of people who are striving might and main to become, not what Nature intended them to be- musicians, cooks, mechanics, carpenters, gardeners, inventors- but "somebody": to become successful, famous, powerful; to become something that will bring not quiet and self-fulfillment, but self-glorification and self-expansion — Anthony De Mello

The morning opens, a mist of innocence appears across the countryside that tells each one of us the day is new. That feeling of hope, love and the humble awareness of our duty becomes clear if even for a moment. It is that experience of inspiration that follows us into a small town woken by a cool frost on this Sunday morning and the laughter of children playing. — Kris Courtney

We have to listen to the child we once were, the child who still exists inside us. That child understands magic moments. We can stifle its cries, but we cannot silence its voice.The child we once were is still there. Blessed are the children, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.If we are not reborn if we cannot learn to look at life with the innocence and the enthusiasm o childhood it makes no sense to go on living. — Paulo Coelho

I am representing here - the sound of silence. The cry of innocence. And, the face of invisibility. I represent millions of those children who are left behind, and that's why I have kept an empty chair here as a reminder. — Kailash Satyarthi

The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig ... The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. — Felix Frankfurter

Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at. — John Wyndham

Abuse manipulates and twists a child's natural sense of trust and love. Her innocent feelings are belittled or mocked and she learns to ignore her feelings. She can't afford to feel the full range of feelings in her body while she's being abused - pain, outrage, hate, vengeance, confusion, arousal. So she short-circuits them and goes numb. For many children, any expression of feelings, even a single tear, is cause for more severe abuse. Again, the only recourse is to shut down. Feelings go underground. — Laura Davis

In Baltimore, kids grow up very quickly. You're placed in a lot of situations that a child shouldn't be in and a lot of Baltimore kids lose innocence very soon. — Sheldon Candis

We're children. We're supposed to be childish. — George R R Martin

When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they don't really know what they mean. — William Faulkner

It is difficult to frighten those who are easily astonished; ignorance causes fearlessness. Children have so little claim on hell, that if they should see it they would admire it. — Victor Hugo

Be ever watchful for the opportunity to shelter little children with the umbrella of your charity; be generous to their schools, their hospitals, and their places of worship. For, as they must bear the burdens of our mistakes, so are they in their innocence the repositories of our hopes for the upward progress of humanity. — Conrad Hilton

The television, iPod, and Internet have trespassed upon the innocence of America's children, while preoccupied mothers and dispassionate fathers stare aghast wondering what went wrong. They don't stop to think of their own contributions to the persuasions influencing their children. After all, where do kids as young as elementary age get money to rent rock videos and the latest rap DVDs? — Billy Graham

The human body represents to me the same universal innocence, timelessness and purity of all seed pods, suggesting the mother as well as the child, the parental as well as the descendant, conceived according to nature's longings. — Ruth Bernhard

Regarding local residents attempting to ban sex shops from their neighborhoods: You show me a parent who says he's worried about his child's innocence and I'll show you a homeowner trying to maintain equity. — George Carlin

Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world. — Ian McEwan

Young children see the innocence of life, while some adults live in innocence. — Jan Jansen

'Good Times' is a story about the loss of innocence, how adults are responsible for their actions but children aren't. — Lynda Barry

And so it is becomes important to protect the innocence in children, to prolong their understanding of the two worlds, because innocence like any other thing does not have a lastingness and so the idea is to bring them up beyond the concepts of truth and falsehood, leave it to time for it is a valuable teacher and ensure that they come out of it, all of it unscathed. — Chirag Tulsiani

Drink has shed more blood, hung more crepe, sold more homes, plunged more people into bankruptcy, armed more villains, slain more children, snapped more wedding rings, defiled more innocence, blinded more eyes, dethroned more reason, wrecked more manhood, dishonored more womanhood, broken more hearts, blasted more lives, driven more to suicide and dug more graves than any other evil that has cursed the world. — Evangeline Booth

All children blackmail their parents with their innocence. — Joanne Greenberg

This is not politics ... it's to protect the innocence of children. — Bob Dole

In the hearts of children, there's so much trust and love. If only we could all cling throughout our lives to the wonder and innocence that are always present in a child. Our — Linda Thompson

I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. I tried to tell myself that I had known nothing of what she had done when I chose her. I tried to talk myself into the state of innocence in which children love their parents. But love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible ... And perhaps we are responsible even for the love we feel for our parents. — Bernhard Schlink

There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child's perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow. That innocence (like every kind of innocence children have) is rooted in their trust of you, one that you will shortly be obliged to betray; whether it is fair or not, whether you can help it or not, you are always the ultimate guarantor or destroyer of that innocence. — Michael Chabon

You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.
It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched. — Audre Lorde