Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Dickens

Dickens lands this line like a grin with a knife behind it: a joke that flatters lawyers with necessity while quietly accusing them of feeding on human failure. On the surface, it’s a neat syllogism - wrongdoing creates disputes; disputes create legal work. Underneath, it’s an indictment of a society that industrializes vice into a profession and then congratulates itself for managing the mess.

The barb works because it reverses the moral hierarchy. “Good” doesn’t mean virtuous here; it means competent, reputable, employable. Dickens is poking at the way institutions launder moral ambiguity into respectable careers. The lawyer becomes a kind of moral recycler: converting “bad people” into billable hours, drafting the paperwork that turns harm into procedure. The punchline isn’t that lawyers are evil; it’s that the system rewards a particular kind of goodness - tactical, adversarial, often indifferent to the human cost.

Context matters: Dickens wrote amid the maze of Victorian bureaucracy, when law and administration expanded alongside urban poverty, debt prisons, and punishing social codes. He made a literary sport of exposing how “justice” could feel like theater staged for those who could afford tickets. So the quote isn’t merely anti-lawyer; it’s anti-complacency. It suggests a feedback loop: the more a society tolerates exploitation and inequality, the more it needs “good” professionals to rationalize it - and the more normal the arrangement becomes.

It’s funny because it’s true in a slightly sick way, which is Dickens at his sharpest.