"There are some good rules and there are some lousy rules"
About this Quote
Pinter’s genius here is the deadpan shrug that lands like a threat. “There are some good rules and there are some lousy rules” sounds like a child’s summary of life, but that’s the point: the language is aggressively ordinary, stripped of theory, leaving only judgment. Pinter doesn’t argue for rule-following or rebellion; he stages the moment before either, when power is felt as an atmosphere and you’re asked to pretend it’s just common sense.
The line’s quiet subtext is that “rules” are never neutral. In Pinter’s world, a rule is rarely a principle; it’s a lever. Someone made it, someone benefits from it, someone gets punished by it. Calling some rules “good” and others “lousy” smuggles in a moral sorting mechanism that feels democratic, even reasonable. But it also reveals how fragile that sorting is: who decides which is which, and what happens to the person who disagrees?
Context matters because Pinter wrote under the long shadow of postwar British conformity and Cold War coercion, then became an outspoken critic of state violence and political euphemism. His plays famously turn on pauses, omissions, and the banalities people use to cover domination. This sentence plays the same game. It’s a neat piece of conversational camouflage: a statement no one can really contest without sounding difficult. That’s the trap Pinter loved to build. The line isn’t advice; it’s a diagnostic. It shows how easily “reasonableness” becomes the language of compliance, and how quickly “lousy” becomes whatever threatens the room’s unspoken hierarchy.
The line’s quiet subtext is that “rules” are never neutral. In Pinter’s world, a rule is rarely a principle; it’s a lever. Someone made it, someone benefits from it, someone gets punished by it. Calling some rules “good” and others “lousy” smuggles in a moral sorting mechanism that feels democratic, even reasonable. But it also reveals how fragile that sorting is: who decides which is which, and what happens to the person who disagrees?
Context matters because Pinter wrote under the long shadow of postwar British conformity and Cold War coercion, then became an outspoken critic of state violence and political euphemism. His plays famously turn on pauses, omissions, and the banalities people use to cover domination. This sentence plays the same game. It’s a neat piece of conversational camouflage: a statement no one can really contest without sounding difficult. That’s the trap Pinter loved to build. The line isn’t advice; it’s a diagnostic. It shows how easily “reasonableness” becomes the language of compliance, and how quickly “lousy” becomes whatever threatens the room’s unspoken hierarchy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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