Justice & Law Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Colton opens with a neat little bait-and-switch: he frames his confession as an act of justice, as if authorship were a moral liability requiring disclosure. That first clause - "justice to my readers" - sounds noble, then undercuts itself with a petty, almost lazy motive: he writes because he has nothing to do. The joke lands because it flips the usual authorial pose. Instead of claiming inspiration, duty, or genius, he admits to boredom, turning literary production into a kind of idle fidgeting.

Then he pivots to "justice to myself", and the self-mockery sharpens into self-defense. If writing can be dismissed as the pastime of the unoccupied, Colton insists there is still a boundary: he will stop when he has nothing to say. The subtext is reputation management. He knows the cultural suspicion around writers who publish too much, too easily - the era's equivalent of noise flooding the marketplace - and he tries to separate his "idle" impulse from empty output. He wants readers to believe in an internal censor, a standard.

The line also performs a clever asymmetry: readers deserve honesty about his motives; he deserves protection from their judgment. That tension is the engine of the aphorism. In the early 19th-century world of periodicals, sermons, and pamphlets, writing was both moral performance and commercial habit. Colton, a clergyman turned quotable cynic, winks at both economies: he knows writing can be vanity or vocation, and he positions himself as just self-aware enough to be forgiven.