#innocence

Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one's innocence with the loss of one's prejudices. ↗

— Denis Diderot

#company #innocence #instructive #licentiousness #loss

I had no idea that he was going to write that, but I've always believed that insecurity was what would keep you always in your innocence, no matter what the business did. ↗

— Sally Kirkland

#believed #business #did #going #had

The United States government can indict you on something, and now you've got to prove your innocence. And that's not the Constitution of the United States. ↗

— Leonard Peltier

#got #government #indict #innocence #now

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

#horse #innocence #truth #beauty

She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#innocence #insanity #beauty

He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back anymore. The gates were closed, the sun was down, and there was no beauty left but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of youth, of illusion, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#beauty

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 for men to live without breaking laws. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#government #innocence #law #libertarian #men

For Mercy has a human heart; Pity, a human face; And Love, the human form divine: And Peace the human dress. Songs of Innocence Cruelty has a human heart And jealousy a human face, Terror the human form divine, And secrecy the human dress. The human dress is forged iron, The human form a fiery forge, The human face a furnace seal'd, The human heart its hungry gorge. Songs of Experience - This poem was discovered posthumously. ↗

— William Blake

#human-nature #innocence #experience

The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#family #innocence #family

He was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment. ↗

— Barack Obama

#americans #innocence #freedom