“People can say whatever they want about me, but I've never done a single thing in my life that I regret.”
Roronoa Zoro Quotes
3 quotes from One Piece, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Constitutionally incapable of the backward glance. Useful in a first mate and unbearable in a captain, which the series understands and never asks him to be.
“Scars on the back are a swordsman's shame.”
A rule about geometry. Wounds on the back mean you turned around, and turning around means running, so the location of the injury is a record of conduct that cannot be argued with afterwards. It is the tidiest possible statement of a code, and the series spends a great deal of time testing whether tidy codes survive contact with real situations. Mostly they do not. What is worth noticing is that this particular one has no moral content at all — it says nothing about who you fight or why, only about which direction you were facing. A pirate can hold it. So can a marine, or a murderer. Codes that concern only your own bearing are the easiest kind to keep and the least useful for deciding anything, which the story demonstrates repeatedly with characters who have one and still do harm.
“I'll get stronger. Strong enough that my name reaches up to the heavens.”
The wording is odd if you do not know who he is talking to, and most quotations strip that context out. This is addressed to a dead girl, and the promise is not to become the strongest but to become audible — loud enough that the sound travels somewhere she might be. That converts an ambition into a form of correspondence, which is a strange and specific thing for a story about swordsmanship to be doing. It also quietly explains why he never treats the goal as competitive. He is not trying to beat the world's greatest swordsman for the ranking. He is trying to make a noise large enough to reach an audience of one who cannot confirm receipt, and the ranking is only the loudest available instrument.
Episode two, from a man tied to a post and starving, which is the detail that makes it something other than posturing. He is not describing a life that went well. He is describing a life in which every disaster was the result of a choice he still endorses, which is a much narrower claim and a much harder one to earn. Set it against the series' actual position on regret and it gets more interesting, because One Piece is full of characters undone by things they wish they had done differently — the whole Whitebeard generation, most of the Revolutionary Army, half of Water Seven. Zoro is not offered as the correct model. He is offered as the one person constitutionally incapable of the backward glance, which is useful in a first mate and would be unbearable in a captain.