Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“You Heroes pretended to be society's guardians. For generations you pretended not to see those you couldn't protect.”
Tomura Shigaraki Quotes
2 quotes from My Hero Academia, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
A villain built out of an accurate observation — that the rescue apparatus has gaps and he fell through one. The series insists that this explains him without excusing him, and mostly holds the line.
“Heroes and villains both thrive on violence, but we're still categorized.”
The observation is correct and he is the worst possible person to be making it. Everything the profession does is violence — the licences, the rankings, the merchandising and the school all exist to organise who is permitted to hit whom, and the category boundary is drawn by the people doing the permitting. No hero in the series ever answers this. What undercuts him is the word we, which quietly claims membership in a group whose distinguishing feature is not caring about the argument. His organisation is not a critique of the licensing regime; most of them are there because they enjoy it or have nowhere else to be. He is the only person in the room making the case, and the case would be stronger from anyone else.
On first hearing it is adolescent, and the show wants it to sound that way — a man-child in a hoodie announcing that he hates everything, backed by nothing more coherent than appetite. The later reveal does not make him sympathetic so much as make the sentence accurate. A boy dissolves his family, wanders a city in visible distress, and is passed by adults who are heroes by profession and busy by circumstance. He is not describing an ideology. He is describing an observation, gathered empirically, that the rescue apparatus has gaps and he fell through one. What the series does well here is refuse to let that function as justification while insisting it functions as explanation. The distinction is easy to state and almost impossible to dramatise, and this is the rare villain arc that holds both without collapsing into either the tragic misunderstood victim or the monster who was always going to be one.