Justice & Law Quote by Ben Hecht

“Listen, little boy” lands like a slap in a back room: not advice so much as initiation. Ben Hecht, the newspaperman-turned-Hollywood speed demon, knew how power talks when it’s done pretending to be polite. The line’s genius is its mock paternalism. It frames ruthlessness as mentorship, shrinking the listener to a “little boy” so the speaker can enlarge his own authority. It’s condescension disguised as a favor.

The “only one law” is the kind of law that flourishes where real laws are negotiable: studios, rackets, politics, any system where credit and blame are currencies. “Do it first” is about preemption, staking territory before anyone can. “Do it yourself” is less self-reliance than control: delegating creates witnesses, dependencies, loose ends. Then the kicker: “keep on doin’ it.” That’s the bleakest part. It’s not a single hard choice; it’s a habit, a lifestyle, a muscle you build until trouble stops being an accident and becomes a management problem.

Hecht’s subtext is practically a wink at the audience: you want to stay clean in a dirty business? Stop believing in cleanliness. The rhythm of the sentence - blunt clauses, no ornament, streetwise compression - mimics the worldview it sells. It’s a survival manual written in the cadence of menace, and it works because it doesn’t argue. It recruits.