We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We'd have eaten ourselves alive long ago.
The enabling power of the Atonement strengthens us to do and be good and to serve beyond our own individual desire and natural capacity.
There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.
I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.
That proves something- that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human.
Everyone is capable of everything.
Unfortunately, a human being is able to comprehend only that amount of evil which he is able to commit himself.
A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us worthy of using it.
I have the capacity of being more wicked than any example that man could set me.
We have an incredible capacity for the worst possible evil, all of us, it was that we also have this incredible capacity for good. And that is why we are all of us appalled when something bad happens. Because if the bad was the norm, we would just shrug our shoulders and say "well tough luck, this is how the cookie crumbles" kind of thing but none of us does that.
For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.
An artist has an obligation to tell the truth. [...] that the true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves. We are the monsters. (And the heroes too). Each of us has within himself the capacity for great good, and great evil.
The majority of men are more capable of great actions than of good ones.
We human beings are humane in part because we can look beyond our biology.
Everyone is acting from his own level of consciousness. This is all we can ask of ourselves or anyone else. However hurtful someone is, he is doing the best he can, given the limits of his consciousness.
You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it is horrible because I could commit it.
Still I believe that Hanna Arendt, she was wrong when she tried to say that we are all actually capable of this, it's not true. I think it's not true. There are certain things human beings are not capable of. I mean people, even normal human beings. You have to do certain things in order to become what the enemy was and I didn't accept her philosophical outlook on that.
... there is wisdom in madness and strong probability of truth in all accusations, for people are complete, and everyone is capable of everything.
If the devil doesn't exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?
Man is not equally moral at all hours, this is well known. If his morality is judged to be the capability for great self-sacrificing resolutions and self-denial (which, when continuous and grown habitual, are called holiness)
Democracy maintains that government is established for the benefit of the individual, and is charged with the responsibility of protecting the individual, and is charged with the responsibility of protecting the rights of the individual and his freedom in the exercise of his abilities. Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice.
I want to be optimistic because I don't think man is intrinsically violent.
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
[Humans'] capacity to intervene, to compare, to judge, to decide, to choose, to desist makes them capable of acts of greatness, of dignity, and, at the same time, of the unthinkable in terms of indignity.
