“If you let people follow their feelings, they will be able to do good. This is what is meant by saying that human nature is good.”

Source: Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Red Prophet (1988), Chapter 17.

As quoted in The New York Times (3 January 1985)

Source: You Can Heal Your Life

Address at the Conference on Cosmic Design, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C. (April 1999)
This comment is modified in a later article derived from these talks:
:Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.
:* "A Designer Universe?" at PhysLink.com http://www.physlink.com/Education/essay_weinberg.cfm

Quoted in: V. Thomas (2009) The God Dilemma: To Believe Or Not to Believe,.

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 3 (p. 22)