Alice Miller Quotes

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

The usual cause of evil in the world is that at any given time half the people in the world are awake.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

My research for 'Adam' affected me profoundly, particularly the research into evil's underbelly. We tend not to think about evil until it pokes its head out of the air about us and then it tends to scare us silly. As well it should.

Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.

It often seems... the human race has twittered away its existence singing an endless song - a song of waste and hatred, where there should be progress and love.

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.

We're all caught up in circumstances, and we're all good and evil. When you're really hungry, for instance, you'll do anything to survive. I think the most evil thing - well, maybe that's too strong - but certainly a very evil thing is judgment, the sin of ignorance.

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all—the apathy of human beings.

Hardly any man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.

How embarrassing for man to be the greatest miracle on earth and not to understand it!

When skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man

Much of the evil in the world is due to the fact that man in general is hopelessly unconscious.

If God were to remove all evil from our world (but somehow leave human beings on the planet), it would mean that the essence of 'humanness' would be destroyed. We would become robots.

So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.

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.

Evil is not any superhuman, but it is HUMAN.

How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy.

Men of perverse opinion do not know the excellence of what is in their hands, till someone dash it from them.

I think that a good person can sometimes do wrong out of ignorance or weakness or wrong thinking, but when hard times come, the goodness wins out after all. And a bad person can often seem good and trustworthy for a long time, but when hard times come, the evil in him gets revealed.

People cannot accept their own evil if they do not at the same time feel loved, respected and trusted.

The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world.

People are naive about such things, and they would rather write them off as evil than attempt to understand them. An unfortunate truth, but a truth nonetheless.

There is too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will. I must concede you the Devil. God doesn't really need to punish us, Miss Barton. We're so busy punishing ourselves.