Philip Zimbardo Evil Quotations

The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.

What happens when good people are put into an evil place? Do they triumph or does the situation dominate their past history and morality?

Evil is knowing better, but willingly doing worse.

Bullies may be the perpetrators of evil, but it is the evil of passivity of all those who know what is happening and never intervene that perpetuates such abuse.

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.

The world is, was, will always be filled with good and evil, because good and evil is the yin and yang of the human condition.

We like to think there is this core of human nature – that good people can't do bad things, and that good people will dominate over bad situations. Infact, when we look at the Stanford prison studies, that we put good people in an evil place, and we saw who won. Well, the sad message in this, is in this case is the evil place won over the good people.

The line between good and evil is movable and it's permeable.

Heroism is the antidote to evil.

It was God who created hell as a place to store evil. He didn't do a good job of keeping it there though.

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?