Albert Bandura Quotes

They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

Everybody is a hypocrite. You can't live on this planet without being a hypocrite.

I think I wear my hypocrisy on my sleeve. I would never say I'm not a complete hypocrite.

People interest me a lot: why we are kind, why we are cruel, how we learn the difference, what makes us act in ways contrary to those we've been socialized with.

There's so much saint in the worst of them, and so much devil in the best of them, that a woman who's married to one of them, has nothing to learn of the rest of them.

I don't judge my characters.

So many people witness atrocities and can't take their eyes away from them, but that doesn't mean they're good.

If you've ever liked an artist or someone who then does something or is accused of something extremely corrupt, and your moral conscience won't allow you to accept that artist, the truth is then that creates a void in your life. Because then something you loved was taken from you.

People go down bad paths and they make bad decisions, but it's always justified in their head.

Right and wrong implies some standard... some truth... something non-negotiable. And this is a negotiable world. Everything is up for debate today. There's your truth and her truth and my truth. And what's true for me today might not be true for me tomorrow. Before we know it, we are so far down the road that where we are in no way resembles where we were not so long ago.

We are not nave enough to ask for pure men; we ask merely for men whose impurity does not conflict with the obligations of their job.

A little hypocrisy is better than losing.

He [William Gladstone] made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice.

Intelligence work has one moral law—it is justified by results.

Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to.

Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils; but present evils triumph over philosophy.

It seems that in the world of politics, lying is not such a big deal.

Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, And vice sometime's by action dignified

The best men are not consistent in good--why should the worst men be consistent in evil?

Ideology gives people the illusion of principles and dignity while making it easier for them to part with them.

Governor [Myron] Herrick is not a bad man; he is simply weak. He is one of those men who can do dishonest things honestly.

To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one's notion of social justice, public conscience, a better future, etc.

Nobody is all good or bad.

We have to be aware of our fragilities as human beings - when we see cruelty, to understand that in certain conditions, we could be cruel, too.