Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrew McCarthy

That line is a quiet key to why good stories feel less like morality plays and more like human weather. McCarthy isn’t praising righteousness; he’s pointing to a script-level truth about conflict: it only catches fire when every character can make a plausible case to themselves. The fascination is with self-justification as a kind of engine. People don’t wake up thinking, Today I’ll be the villain. They wake up thinking, I’m doing what I have to do.

Coming from an actor, the remark doubles as a craft note. Acting collapses if you play “wrong.” You have to locate the internal logic that makes a choice inevitable, even when it’s ugly. “Everybody… thinks that they’re in the right” is really: everyone has a wound, a story, a grievance, a code. Once you grant that, the performance shifts from judgment to comprehension, and the audience gets pulled into the uncomfortable part: recognizing pieces of themselves in people they’d rather label.

Culturally, the line lands because it mirrors our current argument economy. Online, righteousness is the default posture; everyone’s the protagonist of their own thread. McCarthy’s fascination reads like a mild alarm: if every side feels morally certified, persuasion becomes nearly impossible and escalation becomes easy. In narrative terms, that’s great drama. In real life, it’s how relationships fracture and politics calcify.

The subtext is empathy without endorsement: understand the “right” each person is chasing, then watch how those competing certainties collide. That’s not just storytelling; it’s a diagnosis of how we live now.