Life & Wisdom Quote by Walter Savage Landor

A tidy chiasmus with teeth: Landor flips cause and effect until law itself starts to look like a moral hazard. The line works because it refuses the comforting civics-class story that legislation is simply society getting better at being good. Instead, it suggests a feedback loop: corruption doesn’t just produce rules; rules can produce corruption.

Landor’s target isn’t “law” in the abstract but law as accumulation - the piling up of statutes, prohibitions, and penalties that pretend to substitute for character. “Many laws” implies bloat and distrust: a regime so anxious about human behavior it tries to regulate every seam of daily life. That kind of legal overgrowth can turn ordinary people into rule-breakers by design. When life becomes a maze of technicalities, compliance starts to feel less like virtue and more like luck, status, or insider knowledge. The moral center shifts from “Do the right thing” to “Don’t get caught” - a subtle demotion of ethics into mere strategy.

Written by a poet with an abrasive independence, the aphorism carries the romantic-era suspicion of institutions and the 19th-century reality of expanding bureaucracies and punitive codes. Landor had watched governments treat law as theater: performative moralizing for the public, selective enforcement for the powerful. The subtext is not anarchic; it’s diagnostic. A society that needs endless laws may already be signaling its decay, and a society buried under endless laws may accelerate that decay by training citizens to bargain with their conscience.

The sting is symmetrical: bad men write the rules, and the rules - in excess - help manufacture more bad men.