Good At Heart

This question has troubled me for years...perhaps I am just overly sensitive to all the harshness we as humans inflict on one another, not only in the past but certainly in the present as well. I may have lost a certain amount of faith
in people and in myself. I do struggle with this everyday but there is a small place in my soul that I keep reserved for hope.
Its such a mystery to me why we choose to hurt one another..why we feel the need to destroy each other...in body and/or spirit.
So are people 'good at heart'...I can't answer...sorry..I just don't know...
I can't even come up with something to satisfy myself.
I've seen people do horrible things...I've also seen people do amazing, wonderful things...
I think this line from this film gets to me more so than any other.
I hope more people will respond to this post..I feel I need to hear other views on this...thanks for getting us started.

I think we all are born with an equal amount of good and evil, as we progress in our lives the levels fluctuate and some people don't fight the evil and some people do their best to fight it, and it's impossible to make a blanket statement because there are so many bad people, but there are also so many good people in the world.

I believe that people really are good at heart.

Can you think of anyone you have known who was born naturally bad/cruel/evil/heartless..etc..?

People are naturally good. But circumstances and events shape the way they turn out to be.

From the moment we are born there are already people in the world who have developed into hate-filled beings because of events surrounding their lives. These people can influence us for the better or worse. We can choose to become like them or not.

Our world is now full of "bad" people who do/create bad things.
Therefore a tendency to believe that people are naturally bad is understandable.

But I believe we do have a choice.




"He's three years old, gentle as a kitten, and likes dogs." I wonder whether Mark means that he eats dogs or is fond of them?

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that is a intriguing question and it has been on the tip of my mind forever. sometimes i think yes. because i mean the four helpers that guarded the secret annex were certainly good and they were germans. but when you think of hitler and all the other people who spent their entire lives believing in something that's wrong then the subject arrives. hitler thought he was doing good, he thought he was helping germany become a "master" race.and he only helped germany become the most hated country. well bottom line is i don't really know.but one thing's sure not all people are good and not all people are bad.

It has often been pointed out that Anne wrote this sentiment BEFORE she arrived at a concentration camp.

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That quote is taken out of context for the movie. It could be argued that Anne herself may have changed her view on that, if she had known what would happen in the last six to eight months of her life. It is a fact that she was somewhere around halfway finished editing her diary so it could be used in a literary format later on. In these edits, she changed a lot of things, so she may have changed that (something hard to understand, mostly Otto published the edited entries as Anne had written them a second time, but in regard to her problems with her mother, he published unfavorable passages Anne herself had edited out).
I think the "people are really good at heart" quote, which is one of the most quoted phrases she wrote, and is also the one most often used out of context, did not extend to the Nazis. It was a much more general phrase, meaning she would believe in the basic good of mankind. I think it was kind of an "age of innocence" thing, where she believed that people start out good at heart, and still retain some of it, but I REALLY don't think she was saying that she believed in Hitler's good-heartedness. Anne had high moral standards, and she was more mature than many many teenagers, and she had a good idea of what was going on out in the world. She knew that each person had to make a choice, and she didn't believe people were inherently evil. She just accepted that many people would make bad decisions, and that would shape who they were.

Even though she wrote that, it should be mentioned that Otto had to remind her not to lump all the Germans together and hate them. He reminded her of Meip and Kugler (Kraler), who were both born in the Germanic country of Austria. He reminded her of old friends such as Gertrude, the young girl who doted on Anne as a baby and who Mr. and Mrs. Frank had come to love as a daughter, who were still in Germany. He reminded her of her own German heritage (which she hated and decided she would NOT be German after the war, she would become a Dutch citizen.)

With the words "despite everything, people are really good at heart" being used out of context, it makes it seem that Anne felt no personal anger or hatred for the people committing these crimes against her, her friends, and her people. If that particular phrase was meant to be a blanket of forgiveness against the Nazis and the indifference of the people, it would nullify much of what was in her diary, of her fear, her anger, and her sense of decency. Added is the problem that the movie (and play) made that the last line in the movie gives it something similar to another well-known phrase: "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." Anne was intelligent. Anne was mature. But Anne was, after all, a 15-year-old girl, and she felt things strongly. It's unreasonable to assume that just because of one line in her diary says she believes people are good at heart, she didn't harbor anger, disappointment and frustration (and, yes, hatred) for the people who had put her and her loved ones in the predicament they ended up in.