Scott Snyder Quotes

Sometimes when you love people, you want to believe they're good.

Having the support of our communities is absolutely essential to productive and sustainable crime prevention efforts. While there are law enforcement agencies that have meaningful and transparent relationships with all segments of their communities, it is fair to say that there are other agencies that need to further enhance relationships and build trust within their communities, particularly among disenfranchised segments.

DO I BELIEVE THAT PEOPLE ARE BASICALLY GOOD? Yes, I do believe that, and I trust Buddhists and Hindus and Moslems to seek the good and to want to live in peace.

We signal that good can be achieved amongst human beings who are prepared to trust, prepared to believe in the goodness of people.

I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It's you I'm not entirely sure of.

Only a fool can believe people are basically good

We need to believe I think in justice. We need to run our lives as if justice existed... If we abandon a belief that justice will eventually be done, we make this world much more difficult for ourselves.

I do not believe with the Rochefoucaults and the Montaignes that fourteen out of fifteen men are rogues. I believe a great abatement from that proportion may be made in favor of general honesty.

I believe people are wonderful. The vast majority of people have never hurt anybody in their lives.

I think inevitably over the course of my lifetime there's been an underestimation of the American people, and I believe they are really the ones that give me hope. There's so much of "they don't know this, and they don't know that," and they're always denigrating.

There may not be a hell, but those who judge may create one. I think people are over-taught. They are over-taught everything. You have to find out by what happens to you, how you will react. I'll have to use a strange term here... "good." I don't know where it comes from, but I feel that there's an ultimate strain of goodness born in each of us. I don't believe in God, but I believe in this "goodness" like a tube running through our bodies. It can be nurtured. It's always magic, when on a freeway packed with traffic, a stranger makes room for you to change lanes... it gives you hope.

I personally think that most people, most of the time, do the right thing. I just believe this. Otherwise, the world would be chaos, and it's not.

Good people always rise to your level of expectation.

If it wasn't for good," my mother says, "we human beings would have been wiped out a long time ago. Either the monsters would have gotten us or we would have killed each other off with greed and jealousy and anger. So we have to believe in good. We have to look for the good in ourselves.

I believe people are genuinely good. I don’t like to see the bad in people, so because of that, I could see myself falling into a bad situation. But thankfully, I haven’t yet.

People needed to believe in gods, if only because it was so hard to believe in people.

It reinforced everything that I believe. I am an optimist. I believe in the goodness of people.

I just think it's strange when people say, "There is no God." Because I feel so connected to people and things that I just can't deny that there's a God who wants us to tell good stories and be the best we can be and forgive and be forgiven, even if we're not the best we can be. I really believe innately that we do the best we can.

I think the greatest thing in the world is to believe in people.

The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.

If you can't see that the glass is half full, you can never be a socialist. You have to believe in the goodness of the majority of people to be a socialist. You have to believe that if the majority of people had their way, they would make a society that would be fair for everyone. If you don't believe that, and if you think that the glass is always half empty, then you're never going to have that sensibility.

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

I've seen optimism because I grew up in communities of recovery where people put their lives back together and find tomorrows that they didn't think would be there. That fundamentally changed my life and is so much of where my hope comes from.

Here's what I learned as a mayor and a governor. The way you make communities safer and the way you make police safer is through community policing. You build the bonds between the community and the police force, build bonds of understanding, and then when people feel comfortable in their communities, that gap between the police and the communities they serve narrows. And when that gap narrows, it's safer for the communities and it's safer for the police.

I am openly pro-prosecution and make no bones about it. I don't think there are enough people out there sticking up for victims.