I am innocent of the charge, and nothing you will say however clever you are in the wording of out-of-context pieces, however clever you are in letting people know what 'on and off the record'means, there is only one thing that mattersinthis court of law, sir: Ihavenever had sexual intercourse with her. And that is the truth!

-Archer,Jeffrey Howard, Lord
Giving evidence at a libel trial in1987. Quoted in Michael Crick Jeffrey  Archer: Stranger than Fiction (1996).

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.

-Blackstone, Sir William
  Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol.4, ch.27.  A puzzled visitor is apocryphally said to have remarked,'Better for whom?'

I do not like subversion or disloyalty in any form and if I had ever seen any I would have considered it my duty to have reported it to the proper authorities.But to hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is to me inhuman and indecent and dishonorable.

-Hellman, Lillian Florence
  Letter to  John S  Wood,19 May, on being asked to give information for the McCarthy trials. Collected in US Congress Committee Hearing on Un- American  Activities (1952), pt.8.

   Saints should always be judged guilty until theyare proved innocent.

-Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair
  'Reflections on Gandhi', collected in Shooting an Elephant (1950).

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,ö My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. See Horace 413:23.

-Owen,Wilfred
  'Dulce et Decorum Est', collected in Poems (published 1920).

And the wild boys innocent as strawberries.

-Thomas, Dylan Marlais
  'The Hunchback in the Park'.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives forever.

-Updike,John Hoyer
  Self-Consciousness, I.'A Soft Spring Night in Shillington'.

But who is innocent? By grace divine, Not otherwise,O Nature! we are thine.

-Wordsworth,William
  'EveningVoluntaries', no.4, l.16^17 (published1835).

The innocent and the beautiful Have no enemy but time.

-Yeats,W(illiam) B(utler)
  'In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth andConMarkiewicz', l.24^5. Collected in TheWinding Stair and Other Poems (1933).