Art & Creativity Quote by Pauline Kael

Kael’s line snaps like a paper cut: tiny, clean, and instantly irritating. “A book might be written” is faux-modest scaffolding, the critic’s way of implying the book is already inside her sentence. The real charge detonates in the last three words, where she turns moral certainty into its own suspect institution.

“The injustice of the just” targets a familiar social type: the people who are sure they’re right, and therefore feel licensed to be ruthless. Kael isn’t defending villains; she’s indicting the self-licensed virtue that can’t imagine itself doing harm. The phrase works because “just” carries two meanings at once: morally upright and merely/only. The “just” are not only righteous; they are also reductive, compressing messy human motives into a verdict. Once you’re certain you’re the good side, empathy becomes optional and cruelty can be reframed as discipline, taste, standards, accountability.

As a critic, Kael’s context is the cultural tribunal: reviewers, censors, tastemakers, political scolds, even audiences who treat art as evidence in a case. Her career was built on arguing that aesthetics and ethics don’t line up neatly, that moral hygiene can flatten what’s alive in a movie. The subtext is a warning about purity masquerading as principle. Justice, in the mouths of the “just,” becomes a performance of correctness - and performances, Kael knew, can be the most persuasive kind of lie.