Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Otway

Otway’s line lands like a snarl at a courtroom fresco: we’re used to Justice being blind (impartial in theory), but “lame” turns the allegory into an accusation. Blindness can be a virtue; lameness is dysfunction. It suggests a system that not only fails to see fairly, but can’t move fast enough to matter, can’t chase the powerful, can’t reach the harmed in time. The phrase “amongst us” tightens the blade. This isn’t abstract philosophy or classical lament; it’s a local indictment of English public life, aimed at the audience’s own institutions and complicity.

As a Restoration dramatist, Otway wrote for a culture freshly traumatized by civil war, regicide, restoration, and the paranoid politics of plots and counterplots. Courts and “justice” were visibly entangled with patronage, faction, and spectacle. So the intent isn’t to refine the ideal of justice; it’s to expose how readily that ideal becomes theater. In Otway’s world, law is another stage, and the most convincing performance often wins.

The subtext is bleakly modern: impartiality without capacity is just branding. A blind justice can still be principled; a lame one is structural failure - delay, selective enforcement, procedural inertia that becomes its own form of cruelty. Otway’s brilliance is the compact double wound: he keeps the comforting iconography of Justice only long enough to show it doesn’t stand up in practice.