Philip Zimbardo Quotes

Good people can't out-think evil, cause evil thinks of things good folks can't think of.

I think people respond to villains because people in general are more villainous than heroic.

We all like to think that the line between good and evil is impermeable--that people who do terrible things, such as commit murder, treason, or kidnapping, are on the evil side of this line, and the rest of us could never cross it. But the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies revealed the permeability of that line. Some people are on the good side only because situations have never coerced or seduced them to cross over.

I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I’m still going through the motions.

In one sense, the Stanford prison study is more like a Greek drama than a traditional experiment, in that we have humanity, represented by a bunch of good people, pitted against an evil-producing situation. The question is, does the goodness of the people overwhelm the bad situation, or does the bad situation overwhelm the good people?

Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.

You know, I think a lot of times what happens when we as actors know we're playing a bad guy is we get into bad guy mode. You know what, man? In real life, bad people do good things too and good people do bad things. So you don't necessarily have to be the stereotypical bad guy to still do bad things.

All my books are an inquiry into the nature of evil. Why do good people do bad things? Are any human beings completely evil? Do we all have good within us? That's what I'm interested in.

When good people do bad things, it is sad, but when they reach the point where one can predict that they will do nothing but bad things, a deeper kind of sadness sets in, almost at the level of resignation.

I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.

Good people struggle against what's imperfect about them. The people that we call 'bad' people embrace that kind of stuff, embrace the darker side.

People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.

People are not evil; they are schlemiels.

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good.

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."

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

Evil isn't beautiful on its own. You know?' 'Well, good people are sometimes ugly-' Blanche said at last. 'I don't know about that. Not really,' Bear shook his head. 'If the good's there, and you look for it, you'll see it in some way.' 'I think Bear is right,' Rose said decidedly. 'Fairy tales teach you that. No one who's really good ever stays ugly. It's always a disguise.

The nature of evil, the nature of it, it exists. It exists and I think within us we have the tools. If we have the will, we can combat it. I think the power is within us and it lies in our own conceptualization of God and positivity and compassion and love.

One man alone can't defeat the forces of evil, but many good people coming together can.

I think good things come to good people.

I think that you only occasionally have to play evil because everything you're doing is.

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

People with the purest souls are capable of the greatest evils.

The best government in the world, the best religion, the best traditions of any people, depend upon the good or evil of the men and women who administer them.

I think the human race needs to think about killing. How much evil must we do to do good?