"People are so wonderful," he said steadily, and ignored the whining pulse in his head that reminded him how idiotic words like this sounded when he expressed them. "They have—they have their own souls, their own inner existences. It matters that they exist in the world. They're all beautiful, looked at in the right way. Even when they hurt other people, few of them are doing it just to hurt others, like Voldemort or Bellatrix Lestrange. They have their reasons. You can listen to those reasons and understand them. (...) I want to protect them. I want to prevent people who hurt others from hurting them, of course, but I also want to forgive them, and find some way for them to go on living and forgive themselves, instead of just crumpling them up and putting them in Azkaban or someplace like that. Azkaban is such a waste. There's so much potential in someone like Snape, whom people would dismiss just because he was a Death Eater at one point, or Draco, whom someone might dismiss because of his name and his family's reputation, or Peter, whom everyone thought was a criminal." Harry looked hard at Vera, willing her to understand. "I think that most people can heal of the damage they've done themselves and come back and change again. No one ever stops changing until they're dead. And that means that everyone deserves as much freedom as possible, if they aren't damaging other people's freedom with it, so that they can make decisions as freely as possible. They should have lots of choices. They should have lots of paths. That applies to everyone."