Justice & Law Quote by Anthony Powell

Powell nails the petty cruelty of aging by framing it as jurisprudence: you havent done anything wrong, yet the system keeps docking points. The simile lands because it borrows the logic of modern life, where penalties arrive as if from an impersonal tribunal - higher premiums, slower service, the subtle downgrade in how strangers listen. Its not death hes talking about; its bureaucracy, social sorting, and the way the world quietly rewrites you as liability.

The subtext is a refusal of the moral narrative we like to staple onto time. In most cultures, old age is packaged as either wisdom or decline - a deserved crown or a deserved fall. Powell rejects both. "Crime you havent committed" is a jab at the moralizing that shadows older bodies: if youre tired, you must have been careless; if youre sick, you must have lived badly; if youre sidelined, you must be out of date. The phrase exposes the shabby comfort younger people take in believing that misfortune is earned.

Context matters: Powell was a British novelist with a long view of class and institutions, best known for A Dance to the Music of Time, a series obsessed with how society reassigns rank as the years pass. Read through that lens, the line isnt just personal complaint; its social observation. Aging, in Powells world, is a slow administrative demotion. The wit is dry, but the indictment is serious: time punishes without evidence, and society is happy to enforce the sentence.