Justice & Law Quote by William Blake

Blake’s line lands like a thrown brick: civilization’s proudest institutions are constructed from the very materials that claim to restrain vice. “Stones of Law” makes prison feel less like a regrettable necessity and more like an architectural inevitability of the legal order itself. Law isn’t merely responding to crime; it’s shaping a world that needs cages. Then he sharpens the insult: “Brothels with the bricks of religion.” Not just hypocrisy, but complicity. Religion, positioned as moral cement, becomes the supply chain for the marketplace it publicly condemns.

The power here is in Blake’s brutal symmetry. Two nouns that signal authority - Law and religion - don’t prevent degradation; they furnish it. He’s collapsing the comforting story that social problems are caused by the wicked “out there.” The wickedness is institutional, embedded, respectable. The subtext is that repression manufactures its own outlets: punish people harshly and you make criminals; police desire with shame and you create a shadow economy of sex. The brothel, in this logic, isn’t a stain on a pious society. It’s a byproduct of it.

Context matters: Blake is writing against the grain of a Britain increasingly confident in its systems - industrial, imperial, moral. He mistrusted state power and organized religion alike, especially when they teamed up to discipline the poor while laundering the conscience of the powerful. The imagery is Biblical and street-level at once, prophecy delivered in the language of construction. He wants you to see the city differently: not as progress, but as masonry laid by fear, guilt, and control.