I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.

William Golding
About This Quote

To say that one is a pessimist or an optimist suggests a position on the scale of optimism and pessimism. The reality is that these two terms are merely labels. In fact, most of us are somewhere in between. In life there is no such thing as a bad person or a good person.

Rather, there is only one of each “person” and they all do plenty of things that we would consider bad. For example, a mother who commits a terrible crime against her own child isn’t a bad mother; she just had a bad day. We often consider those people who have committed the most horrific crimes to be the worst people ever, but that’s simply not true.

In fact, many of those people were simply acting as they were programmed to act by their society and upbringing. It’s easy for us to say that those people are bad or evil because we don’t know them personally.

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