It was quite a European war until 1917 when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.

Whether we knew many who died on September 11 or personally knew none we all lost something on that day. Innocence. Security. A trust that our homeland would always be safe.

Like you can find your dream if you firmly believe. You have to have the innocence and you have to have the daringness to trust.

Social media is great I guess but it feels like technology is the sapper of innocence.

When you become a parent or a teacher you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child regulating it.

Unlike any other business in the United States sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence.

Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

A babe in the house is a well-spring of pleasure a messenger of peace and love a resting place for innocence on earth a link between angels and men.

Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for a defense and for a defense only! It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.

I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence there's innocence contained in you but there's also innocence in the process of being lost.

But when you're writing a script - for me anyway - you have to sort of create an enforced innocence. You have to divest yourself of worrying about a lot of stuff like what movies are hot what movies are not hot what the budget of this movie might be.

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.

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

I feel like I'm a much better person when I'm developing my imagination and my innocence and my vulnerability. I like that version of me better than the version where I'm just working on my analytical mind.

To the former child migrants who came to Australia from a home far away led to believe this land would be a new beginning when only to find it was not a beginning but an end an end of innocence - we apologise and we are sorry. To the mothers who lost the maternal right to love and care for their child - we apologise and we are sorry.

This is a generation weaned on Watergate and there is no presumption of innocence and no presumption of good intentions. Instead there is a presumption that without relentless scrutiny the government will misbehave.

Not even the brightest future can make up for the fact that no roads lead back to what came before - to the innocence of childhood or the first time we fell in love.

And that's the mission of The Innocence Project in New York is to exonerate people who have been wrongfully convicted and also work from a policy angle with Congress and state legislatures to prevent future wrongful convictions.

American movies and music deliver themes of freedom innocence and power that appeal to others - partly because America itself was put together out of a multiplicity of national traditions.

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.

More than fantasy or even science fiction Ray Bradbury wrote horror and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear of anything. He wasn't afraid of looking uncool - he wasn't scared to openly love innocence or to be optimistic or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.

Louis Malle was the best filmmaker I've ever worked with. He was such an artist. He was dealing with the theme of innocence and experience.

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.

I might have some character traits that some might see as innocence or naive. That's because I discovered peace and happiness in my soul. And with this knowledge I also see the beauty of human life.

I'm just glad I was able to return to some of that innocence and beauty I had as a child when I started my own family and my children brought me back some of that spirit.

Art saved me it got me through my depression and self-loathing back to a place of innocence.

Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.

Those who improve with age embrace the power of personal growth and personal achievement and begin to replace youth with wisdom innocence with understanding and lack of purpose with self-actualization.