Niels Arden Oplev Quotes

One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.

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

I've always been fascinated by accounts of seemingly 'normal' people who have committed horrendous acts of cruelty and violence. You hear it on the news all the time.

My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.

Man as a pure animal does not exist.

I think that maybe human beings are conditioned to violence.

We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.

There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'

Most people, 95% of people, are good people. It's the 5% who get seduced by power.

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do.

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

The problem here is with a human being, not with a monster, not with an animal. The human being does things that even the monster does not do, because the human is more sophisticated.

Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.

Is the capacity for cruelty inherent in all of us?

Inside each of us, there is the seed of both good and evil. It's a constant struggle as to which one will win. And one cannot exist without the other.

Mankind fears an evil man but heaven does not.

There are people that really live by doing the right thing, but I don't know what that is, I'm really curious about that. I'm really curious about what people think they're doing when they're doing something evil, casually. I think it's really interesting, that we benefit from suffering so much, and we excuse ourselves from it.

You can find inspiration for man's behaviour wherever you look.

There is no limit to suffering human beings have been willing to inflict on others, no matter how innocent, no matter how young, and no matter how old. This fact must lead all reasonable human beings, that is, all human beings who take evidence seriously, to draw only one possible conclusion: Human nature is not basically good.

That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy.

What 'Twilight Zone' did was show we all have a great capacity for good and evil.

The older I get the more I realize there's no real good guys or real bad guys, and I'm curious about how the good guys got good and how the bad guys got bad.

Human nature is what Heaven supplies.

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