“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)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Norman Vincent Peale63
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.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher
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.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist
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.
Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist
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.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist
"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 <br class="br">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.
Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader
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.”
Robert Louis Stevenson book Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)