Life & Wisdom Quote by Karel Capek

Capek’s line is a neat little knife: it slices morality away from legality and then watches the state try to bleed the difference out of you. The speaker doesn’t bother with the lofty question of whether theft is always wrong - a claim that collapses under edge cases (hunger, survival, unjust property). Instead, he pivots to something colder and more reliable: “forbidden” is whatever power can punish. The proof isn’t ethical reasoning; it’s incarceration. Argument becomes architecture.

The joke is brutal because it’s true in the way bureaucracy is true. “I’ll prove it… by simply locking you up” parodies the tone of rational debate while revealing that the conclusion was never up for discussion. The state doesn’t win by persuading; it wins by closing the door. Capek exposes how easily a system can masquerade coercion as certainty, treating enforcement as evidence.

Context matters: Capek wrote in an interwar Europe where liberal democracy and rising authoritarianism were wrestling over what counts as order. His broader work is obsessed with mechanized power - not just literal machines, but institutions that run on procedure, repetition, and obedience. Here, theft is almost a placeholder. Substitute dissent, heresy, “unpatriotic” speech. The logic holds: you don’t need a moral universe, just a penal code and the means to apply it.

The subtext is a warning aimed at comfortable readers who confuse “illegal” with “immoral.” Capek’s cynicism isn’t nihilism; it’s a demand to notice how quickly law can become a self-justifying cudgel.