Holly Black Quotes

I love Brooke. Exploiting her was never my intention.

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

Our repentances are generally not so much a concern and remorse for the harm we have done, as a fear of the harm we may have brought upon ourselves.

It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.

Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.

I'm really interested in the difference between selfishness and generosity. It confuses me to no end because sometimes it all just feels like pure indulgence on my part.

There are people that really live by doing the right thing, but I don't know what that is, I'm really curious about that. I'm really curious about what people think they're doing when they're doing something evil, casually. I think it's really interesting, that we benefit from suffering so much, and we excuse ourselves from it.

Little white lies are told by humans all the time. Indeed, lying is often how we get through each day in a happy little bubble. We spend time and energy rationalizing our own behaviors, beliefs and decision-making processes.

Any of us are capable of doing things we're not proud of under the wrong kind of stresses.

We're all caught up in circumstances, and we're all good and evil. When you're really hungry, for instance, you'll do anything to survive. I think the most evil thing - well, maybe that's too strong - but certainly a very evil thing is judgment, the sin of ignorance.

I look back on my life and have to face the fact that I have been narcissistic and selfish.

In reality, there are very few villains who view themselves as villains. They just have a certain agenda at a certain time.

A friend advises in his interest, not yours.

Greed is all right ... Greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.

Even the best-intentioned of great men need a few scoundrels around them; there are some things you cannot ask an honest man to do.

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.

It's very true that you can be both selfless and selfish at the same time. What we tend towards, particularly in filmmaking, is this binary sort of, 'This is a good guy, this is a bad guy.' And I quite like the fact that life is a bit more complex than that.

It would be a most despicable thing to suggest I would exploit the poor for my own personal gain.

All sin and all crime comes from the same thing: 'I decided. I decided this was okay.'

Everybody has their own agenda, and that makes 'Power' a dark world. There aren't any really clean characters.

Truth in our society often takes a back seat to securing gainful consequences.

I definitely have conned a lot of people in my day. I'm not proud of it; it sounds like I am, kind of, now that I'm saying it.

Selfishness is a quality and not necessarily a bad thing.

Now, I know a lot of things in the big man's world are not what they seem: a lot of people are out for themselves, and you can't always trust what someone says.