Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. — Graham Greene
For nobody is curious, who isn't malevolent. — Plautus
It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't. — Mignon McLaughlin
Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion. — Oscar Wilde
Certain things acquired an evil complexion if phrased, but remained harmless in the mind. — R.K. Narayan
Virtue, dear friend, needs no defense,
The surest guard is innocence:
None knew, till guilt created fear,
What darts or poisoned arrows were — Horace
Justice consists of doing no one injury, decency in giving no one offense. — Marcus Tullius Cicero
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games. — W. H. Auden
There are few mortals so insensible that their affections cannot he gained by mildness, their confidence by sincerity, their hatred by scorn or neglect — Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
If you do not have malice inside, it will not come from outside. — Albanian Proverbs
Short Innocuous Quotes
I am always surprised when people read double entendres into my innocuous babble. — Nigella Lawson
Words themselves are innocuous; it is the consensus that gives them true power. — Gloria Naylor
In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus. — Timothy B. Tyson
Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it. — Anne Sexton
After an existence of nearly 20 years of almost innocuous desuetude, these laws are brought forth. — Grover Cleveland
Experience shows us Wealth unchaperoned by Virtue is never an innocuous neighbor. — Sappho
Innocuous Image Quotes
Innocent Quotes
The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses. — Malcom X
I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge; I pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France. — Louis XVI of France
Children are human beings to whom respect is due, superior to us by reason of their innocence and of the greater possibilities of their future. — Maria Montessori
Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off your relish of spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind; that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself. — Susanna Wesley
When a government becomes powerful it is destructive, extravagant and violent; it is an usurer which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance, for votes with which to perpetuate itself. — Marcus Tullius Cicero
Holy Communion is the shortest and safest way to Heaven. There are others: innocence, but that is for little children; penance, but we are afraid of it; generous endurance of trials of life, but when they come we weep and ask to be. The surest, easiest, shortest way is the Eucharist. — Pope Pius X
The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool. — Stephen King
If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can't, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
There are no innocent civilians, so it doesn't bother me so much to be killing innocent bystanders. — Curtis LeMay
To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower. — William Blake
The Gospel is a very dangerous idea. We have to see how much of that dangerous idea we can perform in our own lives. There is nothing innocuous or safe about the Gospel. Jesus did not get crucified because he was a nice man. — Walter Brueggemann
I don’t think you have a right not to be offended. You have a right not to be physically attacked. I suppose under civil law you have a right not to be slandered and smeared and libelled. I mean, the offence is an entirely subjective thing. You could say something completely innocuous and a person will interpret it as offensive. So no, you don’t have a right not to be offended. — Konstantin Kisin
My perspective of veganism was most affected by learning that the veal calf is a by-product of dairying, and that in essence there is a slice of veal in every glass of what I had thought was an innocuous white liquid - milk. — Rynn Berry
Balanced' is a code for 'denied': a right to free speech that must be 'balanced' against so exhaustive a list of other supposed values means a right that can be exercised only when those in power judge that the speech in question is innocuous to them. — Ronald Dworkin
A lot of my work reflects the incredible influence that America has had on contemporary African culture. Some of it's insidious, some of it's innocuous, some of it's invisible. It's there. — Wangechi Mutu
There seems to be no stopping drug frenzy once it takes hold of a nation. What starts with an innocuous HUGS, NOT DRUGS bumper sticker soon leads to wild talk of shooting dealers and making urine tests a condition for employment -- anywhere. — Barbara Ehrenreich
My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshmallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance, and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming. — Margaret Atwood
A wide and vague impression exists that so-called Eastern religion is more contemplative, innocuous, and humane than the proselytizing monotheisms of the West. Don't believe a word of this: try asking the children of Indochina who were dumped by their parents for inherited deformities that were attributed to sins in a previous 'life. — Christopher Hitchens
I did once leave one of [my kid] watching something on YouTube, something completely innocuous, and I went out of the room and the algorithm kept playing the next thing and the next thing and somehow worked its way around to showing him the trailer for John Carpenter's The Thing - at which point I walked back in. He wasn't happy. — Charlie Brooker
Become conscious of what you think during the day. A negative thought will enter you. At first it will be vague, innocuous, but then it will root in your consciousness and soon it will be impossible to eradicate. — Frederick Lenz
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle. — James A. Baldwin
It is dangerous to engage in even the most innocuous-seeming discourse with the FBI/ Homeland Security/ a local detective. — Ingrid Newkirk
Another reason for the increased self-centeredness of an adolescent is her susceptibility to humiliation. This brazen, defiant creature is also something tender, raw, thin-skinned, poignantly vulnerable. Her entire sense of personal worth can be shattered by a frown. An innocuous clarification of facts can be heard as a monumental criticism. — Louise J. Kaplan
Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories when the grown child confronts them. — Steven Johnson
I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous, and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. 'Nothing is more real than nothing.' They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark. — Samuel Beckett
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field. — James Baldwin
There is something beautiful in the mundane if you take enough microscope to it and focus in on something that seems innocuous to begin with. — Ed Helms
The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent. — Peter Conrad
The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable. — Anonymous
As Christians try to force prayer into public schools, they often settle for a 'moment of silence.' But that supposedly innocuous 'moment of silence' is a deafening roar to a nonbeliever. — Judith Hayes
I think women become more wrapped up emotionally in men when sex is involved. And I think men have a much easier time of having innocuous, meaningless sex for pleasure. It's just how we're built genetically. — Daryl Wein
Margaret Meade is always running around saying that marijuana's just like bread and water! Well, bread and water are poison, and marijuana's a poison. Now, if you like poison, why shouldn't you have it? But don't try to pretend that it's innocuous. — James Purdy
Today I told myself that in actual fact anyone who takes an innocuous and random delight in his life is an absolute lummox. — Robert Walser
Nobody is perfect. I don't think it's the most scathing indictment of anybody. It's pretty innocuous. [Miral] is just the story of one family and one girl, living in that part of the world, and that's what goes on over there. I thought that maybe it would be informative and useful for people to know more about it. — Julian Schnabel
The most welcome joke to me is the one that takes the place of a heavy, not altogether innocuous thought, at once a cautionary hint of the finger and a flash of the eye. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The early days of any relationship are punctuated with a series of firsts - first sight, first words, first laugh, first kiss, first nudity, etc., with these shared landmarks becoming more widely spaced and innocuous as days turn to years, until eventually you're left with first visit to a National Trust property or some such. — David Nicholls
But my vote for Venus's most peculiar feature is the presence of craters that are all relatively young and uniformly distributed over its surface. This innocuous-sounding feature implicates a single planetwide catastrophe that reset the cratering clock... turning Venus's entire surface into the American automotive dream-a totally paved planet. — Neil deGrasse Tyson
Sitting too long in front of a screen proves both physically and psychologically debilitating, no matter how innocuous or even beneficial the programs may be. — Sissela Bok
Men have commonly more pleasure in the criticism which hurts than in that which is innocuous, and are more tolerant of the severity which breaks hearts and ruins fortunes than of that which falls impotently on the grave. — John Ruskin
The notion that business and government are and should be partners is ubiquitous, unremarkable, and repeated like a mantra by leaders in both domains. It seems a compelling and innocuous idea - until you think about what it really means. — Joel Bakan
Don't bother to argue anything on the Internet. And I mean, ANYTHING.... The most innocuous, innocent, harmless, basic topics will be misconstrued by people trying to deconstruct things down to the sub-atomic level and entirely miss the point.... Seriously. Keep peeling the onion and you get no onion. — Vera Nazarian
The more innocuous the name of a weapon, the more hideous its impact. Some of the most horrific weapons of the Vietnam era were named Bambi, Infant, Daisycutter, Grasshopper, and Agent Orange. Nor is the trend new: From the past we have Mustard Gas, Angel Chasers [two can-nonballs linked with a chain for added destruction], and the Peacemaker, to name a few.) — Paul Dickson
Some of the most innocuous inventions have proven earth-shattering, with reverberations felt around the planet. The Internet is the poster child for disruptive technology, but even such inventions as Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPod have rocked their respective industries by changing how we entertain ourselves. — Lynda Resnick
There is nothing by which men display their character so much as in what they consider ridiculous... Fools and sensible men are equally innocuous. It is in the half fools and the half wise that the great danger lies. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I would never do something like Speed 2 again. If Id wanted to make those kind of movies I could have signed up for five of them while it was in the can. It wasnt worth it to me. That was just an innocuous, boring movie. — Jason Patric
From a wine critic's perspective, there are far too many innocuous, over-oaked, over-acidified, or over-cropped wines emerging from California. While those sins would not be a problem if the wines sold for under $20, many are in fact $75-$150. That's appalling. — Robert M. Parker, Jr.
It seemed like the best weapons in my life had always been the most innocuous: empty plastic bins, a blank CD, an unmarked syringe, my smile in a dark room. — Maggie Stiefvater
When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them. — Karen Russell
Look, this isn’t The Mummy. It’s not like a teenaged girl’s diary could resurrect the dead or anything. It’s just the story of her innocuous life. What on earth could an ancient girl have known that would be worth killing someone over? (Tory) You’re asking me that question? People kill each other over a pair of shoes or for wearing the same jacket. (Acheron) — Sherrilyn Kenyon
In Conclusion
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