Parenting & Family Quote by Lillian Hellman

Hellman’s line lands like a slap precisely because it refuses the polite fiction that “neutrality” is available to grown-ups. By pairing “a baby carriage” with “a judge’s chamber,” she corrals innocence and authority into the only two places where impartiality is still rhetorically plausible. A baby hasn’t yet accumulated the bruises, loyalties, and hang-ups that calcify into worldview. A judge is supposed to bracket them anyway, performing impartiality as a civic ritual. Everyone else? We’re improvising with loaded dice.

The intent is less despair than exposure. Hellman isn’t arguing that prejudice is good; she’s arguing that claiming to have none is a form of theater, and usually a self-serving one. “Unprejudiced” becomes a costume people wear to smuggle their preferences in as facts. The subtext is a warning about moral posturing: when someone insists they’re just being “objective,” Hellman suggests you should check whose interests that objectivity quietly protects.

Context matters. Hellman wrote in an America obsessed with ideological purity tests and suspicious of dissent; her career was scarred by the pressures of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the broader mid-century mania for policing beliefs. In that climate, “prejudice” isn’t merely personal bias, it’s the political unconscious: class assumptions, patriotic scripts, and the invisible rules about who gets believed. The line works because it’s theatrical in the best Hellman way: a crisp bit of stagecraft that turns an abstract debate about objectivity into two vivid images, then leaves the audience stuck with the uncomfortable implication that adulthood is, in part, learning to live with your bias without lying about it.