Philip Zimbardo Quotes

I need to do psychology classes. That would be so interesting to me, studying people.

I'm very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people.

I deal with the human psychology and evil. They are my twin issues.

Human Nature is the only science of man; and yet has been hitherto the most neglected.

There is a great deal of human nature in man.

Men are not altogether bad or altogether good.

I'm somebody who's super into psychology and analysis and the human psyche and the human experience.

People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.

Psychology is simply great because it helps you better understand all kinds of people.

I like to believe that most human beings go about things with a point of view that they're just doing what they feel like they need to do at that time. Sometimes people make bad decisions, but it's not evil, not malicious.

I would love to see what's going to happen with science fiction with peoples' heads, because we still have people running around in the year 2050 or 2100 or 2200 and they have incredible technology and you see the effects: laser beams and rays and beaming down and beaming up. Incredible technical things happening, but everybody is still running around jealous, fighting, whacking, cheating. There's got to be something going on! Some kind of change. I'd like to see something starting to happen in that area, with the psychology of the human being and how that changed.

Give a truly good person power, and they’re still a good person. Give a bad person power, and they’re still a bad person. The question is always about the person in between. The one that isn’t evil, or good, but just ordinary. You don’t always know what an ordinary person is like on the inside.

There are, then, these three means of effecting persuasion. The man who is to be in command of them must, it is clear, be able (1) to reason logically, (2) to understand human character and goodness in their various forms, and (3) to understand the emotions--that is, to name them and describe them, to know their causes and the way in which they are excited.

You do not settle whether an argument is justified by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments but between barbarous and civilized behaviour. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.

I do want to write about social/cultural/historical context. I'm interested in relationships, in character, but within a specific social context. Which is kind of a political thing, I admit that. But it's what I'm interested in, and it's how I believe human behavior is legible.

Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.

I'm way past the idea of using ideology or political view as a gauge of human character. I simply don't believe it. And many people, I tend to think most people, feel that way. Since I don't have to worry about it, I'm happy.

Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people.

One never gets to know a person's character better than by watching his behavior during decisive moments.... It is always only danger which forces the most deeply hidden strengths and abilities of a human being to come forth.

Humans were always surprising me.

We may convert every house in the country into a charity asylum, we may fill the land with hospitals, but the misery of man will still continue to exist until man's character changes.

Is it possible, I wonder, for a man to truly change? Or do character and habit form the immovable boundaries of our lives?

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

The real object of the drama is the exhibition of human character.

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. - from the introduction of the 1986 Norton edition