I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.

Anne Frank wrote this line while in hiding with her family and others in the Secret Annex in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. It comes from her wartime diary entries, composed amid fear, confinement, and the escalating persecution and deportation of Jews. The remark is striking because it is voiced in the midst of deprivation and constant danger, yet it records her determination to hold onto moral ideals and a belief in human goodness despite what she was witnessing and hearing about the world outside. The diary was later edited and published posthumously by her father, Otto Frank.

The sentence captures a central tension in Anne Frank’s diary: the collision between brutal historical reality and a young writer’s insistence on hope. “I keep my ideals” suggests an active, disciplined choice—an effort to preserve an inner ethical compass when external events seem to refute it. Her claim that people are “really good at heart” is not naïve optimism so much as a moral stance: a refusal to let persecution define humanity’s essence. The line has endured because it frames resilience as fidelity to values, even when circumstances provide overwhelming evidence of cruelty.

1) “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
2) “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”
3) “In spite of everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.”