Justice & Law Quote by Dick Francis

Dick Francis writes like someone who’s spent a career watching respectability get used as camouflage. This line isn’t a moral scold so much as a cool-eyed field report: for some people, “crime” isn’t a transgression, it’s logistics. The provocation lies in that blunt downgrade of wrongdoing into routine. Once illegality becomes a “way of life,” the usual civic language - guilt, deterrence, shame - stops working. Francis is describing a psychology where law is not a shared code but an obstacle course designed for other people.

The second sentence sharpens the blade. “If laws are inconvenient, ignore them” is pitched in the casual register of entitlement, the tone of someone brushing lint off a jacket, not plotting a felony. That’s the subtext: criminality isn’t always fueled by desperation or ideology; often it’s powered by the same consumer logic that runs ordinary life, just with fewer constraints. The quiet sting comes from “they don’t apply to you,” which implies a self-anointed exemption, a private citizenship. Francis frames lawbreaking as a social relationship, not merely an act: the offender’s real crime is opting out of reciprocity while still benefiting from the order everyone else maintains.

Context matters. Francis, a prolific thriller writer steeped in the worlds of sport, status, and hidden incentives, often fixated on how systems enable bad behavior when manners and money provide cover. The quote lands as a diagnosis of impunity: the most dangerous criminal is the one who doesn’t feel criminal at all.