The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games, #0)

by Suzanne Collins

How quickly civilization disappears. All your fine manners, education, family background, everything you pride yourself on, stripped away in the blink of an eye, revealing everything you actually are. A boy with a club who beats another boy to death. That’s mankind in its natural state.”

What awaited him farther down that slope if he was unable to stop his descent? What else might he be capable of?

It’s one thing to speak of humans’ essential nature theoretically, another to consider it when a fist is smashing into your mouth.

I do think people are forgetting the war too fast. What we did to each other. What we’re capable of. Districts and Capitol both.

Didn’t these people understand that the whole system would collapse without the Capitol’s control?

If Bobbin’s death had been self-defense, what was Mayfair’s? Not premeditated murder. Not murder at all, really. Just another form of self-defense. The law might not see it that way, but he did. Mayfair may not have had a knife, but she had the power to get him hanged.

Perhaps because he hadn’t actually seen her die, or even had a good look at the body, he felt less emotional than when he’d killed Bobbin.

What was there to aspire to once wealth, fame, and power had been eliminated?

if even the most innocent among us turn to killers in the Hunger Games, what does that say?