No one just starts giggling and wearing black and signs up to become a villainous monster. How the hell do you think it happens? It happens to people. Just people. They make questionable choices, for what might be very good reasons. They make choice after choice, and none of them is slaughtering roomfuls of saints, or murdering hundreds of baby seals, or rubber-room irrational. But it adds up. And then one day they look around and realized that they're so far over the line that they can't remember where it was.

The novelist Dumas would one day borrow features from both of his uncles, not to mention his grandfather, the acknowledged scoundrel, in fashioning the central villains of The Count of Monte Cristo. Reading court documents detailing the sordid unraveling of Charles's sham fortune, which would have devastating effects on his daughter and her unsuspecting husband, I couldn't help thinking that one of the interesting things about Dumas's villains is that, while greedy and unprincipled themselves, they produce children who can be innocent and decent. This was something that the writer understood very well from his own family.

Don't let the evil actions of broken people define your view of our world! Don't be terrorized into a diluted, hopeless reality.

Don't let the evil actions of broken people define your view of our world! Don__ be terrorized into a diluted, hopeless reality.

Some selfish people rise because some kind people haven't learned the art of saying no to them.

The world turns and the world changes,But one thing does not change.In all of my years, one thing does not change,However you disguise it, this thing does not change:The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.