George Saunders Quotes

I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil."

People don't think of themselves as evil.

You're not a bad person. But you sometimes do bad things. You know what that makes you? Human.

Personally I don't believe in bad people. I think there's always a reason for people acting badly.

It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.

'Evil' is quite a blanket term. People aren't the demonic characters we would like them to be sometimes.

As an actor, if you decide that someone is bad... you can't play bad, because even the worst person doesn't think what they're doing is bad.

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

I don't think anyone sets out to do something bad, it's just that it's very difficult.

All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes.

Motives are often more important than actions

I try to show ugliness, but with compassion for the people who commit ugly acts.

Nobody really thinks they're evil.

I sometimes am discouraged by what seems to be a sort of conventional disparagement of humankind. I think often people feel that they are doing something moral when they are doing that, but that's not how I understand morality. I much prefer the "everyone is sacred, and everybody errs" model of reality.

Our actions are neither so good nor so evil as our impulses.

Our errors and our controversies, in the sphere of morality, arise sometimes from looking on men as though they could be altogether bad, or altogether good.

You don't just have people who wake up in the morning and say, "What evil things can I do today, because I'm Mr. Evil?" People do things for what they think are justified reasons. Everybody is the hero of their own story, and you have to keep that in mind. If you read a lot of history, as I do, even the worst and most monstrous people thought they were the good guys. We're all very tangled knots.

My only fear is doing something contrary to human nature - the wrong thing, the wrong way, or at the wrong time.

Men do monstrous things but if you call a man a monster you have absolved yourself of blame. You don't have to think that you might ever do these things. I don't think that's true

The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin/mistakes causes us to use our minds to rationalize our action.

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

People do terrible things all the time, but we don’t regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things.

I like to think that good people win. But even good people have other sides. Most people will slow down to get a good look at an accident, even though they won't admit it.

A man's acts are usually right, but his reasons seldom are.