“Every human being is a child of God and has more good in him than evil — but circumstances and associates can step up the bad and reduce the good. I've got great faith in the essential fairness and decency — you may say goodness — of the human being.”
Interview in Modern Maturity magazine (December-January 1975-76)
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Norman Vincent Peale 63
American writer 1898–1993Related quotes

“It is better to be a good human being than to be a bad one. It is just naturally better.”
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis

“I do not look upon human beings as good or bad.”
From 1980s onwards, Grunch of Giants (1983)
Context: I do not look upon human beings as good or bad. I don't think of my feet as a right foot and a wrong foot. … I am a student of the effectiveness of the technological evolution in its all unexpected alterations of the preoccupations of humanity and in its all unexpected alterings of human behaviors and prospects.

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Human Personality (1943), p. 51
Context: At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.
The good is the only source of the sacred. There is nothing sacred except the good and what pertains to it.

“The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.”
"No, Not One," The Adelphi (October 1941), p. 7 http://books.google.com/books?id=hdwYAQAAIAAJ&q=%22The+choice+before+human+beings%22&pg=PA7#v=onepage- 8 http://books.google.com/books?id=hdwYAQAAIAAJ&q=%22is+not+as+a+rule+between+good+and+evil+but+between+two+evils%22&pg=PA8#v=onepage
Context: The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world: that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.

The Way of God's Will Chapter 1-4. Practice http://www.unification.org/ucbooks/WofGW/wogw1-04.htm Translated 1980.

“All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.”
Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)