Alice Miller Quotes

Human nature is not of itself vicious.

All men are born good.

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

I am a person who believes in the good of people and who may have had things influence them to a certain degree, but deep down I think most people are good and would like to be good.

Human nature is what Heaven supplies.

I've never met anyone who is seriously bad.

Nobody starts out evil - we know that. It's life circumstances that lead them to that.

The truth is that goodness is hardwired in humanity.

I think that people are innately good.

People are not born evil, although we all have evil within us.

I firmly believe there are no bad people.

I think we're innately good. But it doesn't mean we're gonna do good all the time. It means you have to strive.

We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you.

I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.

Everybody has an instinctive desire to do good things and avoid evil. But that desire is sterile as long as we have no experience of what it means to be good.

They are inherently good - the bad reactions aren't basic. Every human being is a child of God and has more good in him than evil - but circumstances and associates can step up the bad and reduce the good. I've got great faith in the essential fairness and decency - you may say goodness - of the human being.

What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found courage to say that there is none.

Hard times always uncover the basic goodness and evil of the day.

So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.

Evil is not interesting. What is it, chopping off someone's head? We used to do that as kids, you know, you tear up paper dolls and stuff. I know everyone's done it in the history of the world, but maybe everybody was dumb and they were just looking for something interesting to do. What's really interesting and hard is being good.

Multitudes think they like to do evil; yet no man ever really enjoyed doing evil since God made the world.

Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.

Every good teaching may still end up producing evil bandits who have no principles whatsoever, an outcome even more likely when the teacher is also a bandit.