Daily Inspiration Quote by Ouida

“Petty laws breed great crimes” is a provocation dressed as a proverb: short, rhythmic, and deliberately accusatory. Ouida isn’t excusing wrongdoing so much as indicting the state’s small-mindedness. The adjective “petty” does the heavy lifting. It doesn’t just mean minor; it means mean-spirited, bureaucratic, moralizing. In that framing, law isn’t a neutral guardrail but an irritant - something that needlessly humiliates people, criminalizes ordinary survival, and turns citizens into rule-breakers by sheer attrition.

The line works because it flips the usual story. We’re trained to think crime necessitates law; Ouida suggests law can manufacture crime. That reversal carries a subtext about legitimacy: when regulation feels arbitrary or punitive, compliance stops being a civic habit and becomes a personal compromise. The result is escalation. Small prohibitions teach people to treat the system as an enemy or a game, and once you’ve learned to cheat at the margins, the leap to larger transgressions shrinks. The “great crimes” in her sentence are as much moral as legal: cynicism, corruption, organized evasion, the normalization of contempt.

Context matters. Writing in late-Victorian Europe, Ouida watched expanding modern governance - policing, licensing, censorship, moral regulation - collide with inequality and class privilege. Petty laws rarely land evenly; they discipline the poor and inconvenience the marginal while the powerful route around them. The aphorism doubles as a warning: overreach doesn’t create order, it creates a smarter, angrier kind of disorder.