Justice & Law Quote by William Hazlitt

Envy, Hazlitt insists, isn’t just petty bile; it’s a moral emotion wearing a bad suit. By smuggling “the love of justice” into envy’s recipe, he turns a vice into a diagnostic tool. The line works because it catches something we recognize but rarely admit: the anger isn’t triggered by someone else’s success in the abstract, but by the sense that the world’s reward system has glitched. “Undeserved” good fortune feels like a public violation of the rules, and envy becomes the private protest.

Hazlitt’s phrasing is clinically shrewd. “Among other ingredients” concedes the uglier parts of envy while refusing to let the emotion be dismissed as mere smallness. He’s offering a reframing that flatters the reader just enough to make the confession possible: your resentment might be evidence of a conscience, not just insecurity. That’s the subtextual bargain - accept the charge of envy, but claim the higher ground of fairness.

Context matters: Hazlitt writes as a Romantic-era critic, suspicious of aristocratic privilege and social hypocrisy, when “deservedness” was being renegotiated amid widening public debates about merit, class, and recognition. In that world, watching the wrong people thrive isn’t only annoying; it’s a political education. Hazlitt anticipates a modern truth: outrage is often envy with receipts, and our fiercest resentments double as rough, imperfect arguments about how status should be allocated.