Justice & Law Quote by Cyril Connolly

Connolly’s line is a neat act of moral judo: it concedes the obvious indictment of poverty while pivoting to a less discussed pathology of comfort. “Slums” get the familiar charge sheet - crime as a social byproduct - but “middle class suburbs” receive the sharper, more personal accusation. If slums “breed,” suburbs “incubate”: the biology metaphor shifts from raw survival to a sealed, temperature-controlled environment, suggesting not chaos but containment. The target isn’t hardship; it’s insulation.

The subtext is anti-sentimental and faintly cruel in a way that’s purposeful. Connolly refuses the easy liberal hierarchy where suffering is automatically more “real” than boredom, or where safety equals virtue. “Apathy and delirium” is a deliberately unsettling pairing: apathy as the emotional default of routine, delirium as the warped fantasy life that can flourish when risk is outsourced and desire has nowhere honest to go. The suburb becomes a place where nothing happens, then too much happens internally.

Context matters: Connolly wrote as a British journalist and critic watching mid-century respectability harden into a lifestyle, with postwar prosperity promising stability while flattening intellectual and erotic life. His real complaint is cultural: suburbs don’t just produce blandness; they manufacture a politics of disengagement. If crime is society’s visible failure, apathy is its quiet consent. That’s why the sentence lands like an insult and a diagnosis at once: it doesn’t let the reader stand safely on the “at least we’re not that” side of town.