Jane Goodall Quotes

Everythings a choice. Nobody's born good. Nobody's born evil. It's always a choice.

Evil is not any superhuman, but it is HUMAN.

Good and evil have nothing to do with gods. It has to do with us.

I have an interest in understanding evil. Who is the bad guy - the vampire who kills people and sucks their blood, or the survivalists who kill people to save their own lives? Is evil merely a creation of people? Or is there an evil nature? Or is it in the eye of the beholder? I really like these questions.

I suspect that here theists and atheists would agree: Human beings have within them the ability to choose evil or good. We wake up each day facing the age-old struggle of good and evil. In some situations, mental illness clouds our judgment.

No one is born evil; it's just the choices that they make.

The more...we consider man to be free, the less we can say, that he can neglect to use reason, or choose evil in preference to good

I know there’s evil in the world, and there always has been. But you don’t need to believe in Satan or demons to explain it. Human beings are perfectly capable of evil all by themselves.

There's too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.

I think God gives every one of us our own will, and unfortunately, some people choose to do evil things with it.

The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all.

If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

You seem to think that the only genuine existence evil can have is conscious existence - that no one is evil unless he admits it to himself. I disagree.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be either good or evil.

Evil does not grow out of the soil, nor does mischief spring from the ground. Only man is born to do mischief, just as sparks fly upward.

There is no rational creature which is not capable both of good and evil

All my books are an inquiry into the nature of evil. Why do good people do bad things? Are any human beings completely evil? Do we all have good within us? That's what I'm interested in.

I wish I could understand why so many people have a nearly manic desire to excuse, defend, explain or condone evil.

The human race consists of the damned and the ought-to-be damned.

And does man simply choose evil, or does he create it?

The distinction between good and evil is meaningless if one does not have the freedom to choose between them.

Man has reason, discrimination and free-will such as it is. The brute has no such thing. It is not a free agent, and knows no distinction between virtue and vice, good and evil. Man, being a free agent, knows these distinctions, and when he follows his higher nature, shows himself far superior to the brute, but when he follows his baser nature can show himself lower than the brute.

Mankind's greatest gift... is that we have free choice.