Innocuous Quotes

#1. As C. S. Lewis points out, the journey to hell is a process, which can begin with something as apparently innocuous as a grumbling mood.

Timothy Keller

#2. 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

#3. I could keep going forever, listing all my flaws in order from the most innocuous to the least. I am afraid of spiders ... I fall in love too easily ... I have fierce spells of self-doubt.

Nina LaCour

#4. 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

#5. I've always been discreet - more than discreet. When a friend calls, and I'm doing something innocuous like cooking dinner, I tell them I'm reading or running out to the movies. It's the surveillance I can't stand.

Joshua Cohen

#6. Experience shows us Wealth unchaperoned by Virtue is never an innocuous neighbor.

Sappho

#7. Nothing moved him. No sense of remorse could knock him back into reaction; no tears of regret flowed from those weary eyes.This seemingly innocuous episode, transpired into greater tragedy and it left him vaguely disengaged.

Mehreen Ahmed

#8. I would never do something like Speed 2 again. If I'd wanted to make those kind of movies I could have signed up for five of them while it was in the can. It wasn't worth it to me. That was just an innocuous, boring movie.

Jason Patric

#9. 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

#10. You might think of a thought as an invisible, innocuous little thing. Something that barely exists. But a thought is something hard to conceal. Hold a thought and it melts all over your hands. Touch something else and now you've left traces of it. Hide it under your shirt and it bleeds through.

Thomas Lloyd Qualls

#11. In Orissa, where it is mining bauxite, Vedanta is financing a university. In these creeping, innocuous ways mining corporations enter our imaginations: the Gentle Giants Who Really Care. It's called CSR, corporate social responsibility.

Arundhati Roy

#12. The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family, lurked shyly in the canopies of koa trees, but if someone imitated its song it would abandon its cover at once and fly down in a show of welcome.

Bill Bryson

#13. 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

#14. The idea that reading is a moral quality has unhappily led many conscientious persons to renounce their innocuous dalliance with light literature for more strenuous intercourse. These are the persons who "make it a rule to read.

Edith Wharton

#15. I don't Tweet a lot because I've Tweeted things that I thought were really innocuous about subjects that are inflammatory, and the response is so insane sometimes from people.

Lewis Black

#16. 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

#17. High school sweetheart is such an
innocuous-sounding term for something that can tear out your guts.

Daria Snadowsky

#18. Issues. The dreaded word. It seemed so innocuous. Issues. Everyone had issues.

David Baldacci

#19. 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 A. Baldwin

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. Gluttony might be innocuous were it not for the fact that gluttons tend to disregard whether their self-serving behaviors harm anyone else. We don't need to look far and wide to find examples of gluttonous behavior, as they are numerous throughout the history of capitalism.

Simon Mainwaring

#25. She knew that the dead hid pieces of themselves in the world. They buried organs in the living. They stuffed memories into trees and clouds and other innocuous things.

Lauren DeStefano

#26. In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus.

Timothy B. Tyson

#27. I am always surprised when people read double entendres into my innocuous babble.

Nigella Lawson

#28. I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me.

Mary Roach

#29. The books we read in literature classes
just innocuous letters and symbols on paper, until we run the words through our brains and allow the fiction to manifest in the real world.

Matthew Quick

#30. Anxiety was an irrational beast. You could go through hell and back, and yet the most seemingly innocuous thing could set off a flurry of panic.

Dannika Dark

#31. 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

#32. I can tell you at once that nothing you touch today will have more bloodshed, suffering, and woe attached to it than the innocuous twin pillars of your salt and pepper set.

Bill Bryson

#33. The amazing thing about technology is that people have power. We are seeing it all the time in that innocuous people you would never know are having their voices heard because of this ability and technology we have.

Eric Balfour

#34. Leaning in, he kisses her on the cheek. Like an old acquaintance, she thinks. As though there had never been any passion, nor love, nor rage, nor anything much, just some traces of innocuous familiarity between them. Live long enough, it seems, and every fire can burn itself out.

Robin Black

#35. Sensitive OPA data was scrubbed and overwritten with innocuous-looking logs with false time stamps. Anything too sensitive to trust to a computer, the captain destroyed.

Anonymous

#36. 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.

#37. I like the idea that one thing leads to another. You can tweet something completely innocuous, and then find yourself going off on a tangent that's inspired by a response.

Steve Martin

#38. Learning what seems insignificant can be training us for (and about) what's essential - that what's ultimate can unwittingly be at stake in what appears to be innocuous.

James K.A. Smith

#39. 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

#40. But Nicholas had no room for practicality when there was fun to be had. There was no one as capable of taking a seemingly innocuous situation and turning it into a raving adventure.
Jane. What a boring, and obviously fake, name. This oughta be fun.

Sarah M. Cradit

#41. 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

#42. As proof that HOW we see things matters, Gen. Montgomery took a preprepared text that had been deemed an innocuous complement to his American troops and delivered it in such a way that his condescension prompted more division than unity.

Jean Edward Smith

#43. Apparently they died from overfeeding. Apparently I overfed them. Apparently fish are terrible glutons with absolutely no self-control who just don't know when they've had enough and will stuff themselves to death with those innocuous little beige flakes imaginatively labeled 'fish food.

Steve Toltz

#44. Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast.

Celeste Ng

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.

Charles Baudelaire

#48. The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at.

Siri Hustvedt

#49. Ted shrank from these youths, though he was six foot four and weighed in at two hundred thirty, with a face that looked innocuous enough in the bathroom mirror but often prompted colleagues to ask him what was the matter.

Jennifer Egan

#50. Regardless of what he was doing, no matter how candid or innocuous the photo, Haven always looked as though he'd just stopped screaming.

John Wray

#51. 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

#52. The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

Peter Conrad

#53. When a donor is asked to contribute to a group whose innocuous-sounding name makes it appear to be doing work in the public interest, that donor should have a clear picture of where his or her money is going.

Eric Schneiderman

#54. Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.

Anne Sexton

#55. He lost himself somewhere on the harmless side of lunacy, slightly south of innocuous but definetly north of demented.

Tony Vigorito

#56. All these private, parallel dimensions, underlying such an innocuous little estate; all these self-contained worlds layered onto the same space.

Tana French

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. After an existence of nearly 20 years of almost innocuous desuetude, these laws are brought forth.

Grover Cleveland

#61. There's an innocuous explanation for everything. Everything is a coin that has two sides to it, and one side is innocuous but the other can be ominous.
("New York Blues")

Cornell Woolrich

#62. He was telling war stories. The funny, innocuous ones that made everyone forget that war could leave you without fingers, or legs, or a soul.

Sabrina Fedel

#63. It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure they are always very 'spiritual', that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism.

C.S. Lewis

#64. It is dangerous to engage in even the most innocuous-seeming discourse with the FBI/ Homeland Security/ a local detective.

Ingrid Newkirk

#65. Strange that in the day of tumult, it should be something so innocuous as a dribble of water that prompts a person to tears.

Kate Morton

#66. You can talk about depression as a "chemical imbalance" all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist - a "demon," a "beast," or a "black dog," as Samuel Johnson called it. It could pounce at any time, even in the most innocuous setting.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#67. 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

#68. China and the U.S. are two societies with very different attitudes towards opinion and criticism. In China, I am constantly under surveillance. Even my slightest, most innocuous move can - and often is - censored by Chinese authorities.

Ai Weiwei

#69. Words themselves are innocuous; it is the consensus that gives them true power.

Gloria Naylor

#70. More than the aspirations of an innocuous bird inside a cage, its the story of the cage that fascinates.

Ashutosh Gupta