Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

Justice is supposed to be blind; Butler’s twist is nastier. Here, Justice isn’t impartial so much as inattentive, even complicit. “While she winks at crimes” turns the courtroom goddess into a human operator who knows what she’s doing and chooses not to see it. A wink is intimate, conspiratorial: the system doesn’t merely fail to catch wrongdoing, it signals tolerance, perhaps because crime has patrons, status, money, or the right accent.

Then comes the cruel mechanics of the second line: “Stumbles on innocence sometimes.” If Justice is busy looking away from the guilty, the innocent become the easiest thing to trip over. Butler makes injustice feel less like a rare miscarriage and more like a predictable byproduct of selective enforcement. The “sometimes” is the quiet blade; he’s not arguing that every verdict is wrong, only that the system’s casual corruptions create random casualties. That randomness is the point. When rules are bent for the powerful, everyone else lives under the wheel.

Context matters: Butler wrote in Victorian England, an era loudly committed to moral order while relying on rigid class structures, aggressive policing of the poor, and a legal culture that often treated reputation as evidence. His line reads like a compact indictment of respectable hypocrisy: society congratulates itself on “justice” even as it practices discretion upward and punishment downward.

The couplet works because it’s both mythic and bureaucratic. The goddess imagery promises grandeur; the verbs “winks” and “stumbles” drag her into the messy reality of institutions run by fallible, interested people.