Justice & Law Quote by Ann Robinson

Robinson’s line sounds like a shrug, but it’s really a warning shot at the fantasy that a zoning code can stand in for judgment. Coming from an actress, it lands with a performer’s instinct for what can’t be faked: “good taste” isn’t a measurable input, and trying to reduce it to “square footage” turns culture into accounting. She’s poking at a very American reflex to solve aesthetic and moral disagreements with paperwork.

The craft of the quote is in the narrowing. She starts broad - legislation as blunt instrument - then gets tactile and specific with “a number” and “square footage,” the language of developers, permits, and property listings. That shift matters: it drags the debate out of lofty ideals and into the banal machinery where these fights actually happen. Taste, she implies, is being smuggled into policy through proxies like size, setbacks, and “character” guidelines, letting officials police class and lifestyle while pretending it’s just neutral math.

The final line is the pivot from aesthetics to power: “where individual rights end and community rights begin.” That’s the rhetorical high ground everyone wants, because it frames the dispute as balance rather than control. Subtext: both sides will claim the “community,” and “rights” becomes a moral cover for whose preferences get enforced. The intent isn’t to dismiss community standards; it’s to expose the slippery point where protecting neighbors turns into managing people, and where “taste” becomes an alibi for exclusion.