Wit & Attitude Quote by Lillian Hellman

Hellman turns "unjust" from a moral verdict into a confession of self-betrayal. The first punch is in the syntax: "Unjust". A single, hard stop, like a gavel. Then she immediately undermines it, admitting she has "used that word" the way people use abstractions to keep their hands clean. "Scolded myself with it" suggests a private courtroom where the judge and the defendant are the same person, and the sentence is always delay.

Her real target is the comfort of principle-talk. When she says "All I mean by it now", she strips the term down to its psychological function: "unjust" becomes a euphemism for fear. The phrase "final courage" is key. It implies she has had partial courage before - the kind that registers injury, names it correctly, maybe even protests in language - but not the decisive courage that would force action. Justice, in this frame, is less a cause than an alibi: if you keep arguing about justice, you can avoid the more frightening statement, "I refuse."

Then she detonates the ethical bomb: "refuse to preside over violations against myself". Preside is a brilliantly chosen verb. It casts passivity as complicity, the self as an administrator of its own humiliation. Her closing - "and to hell with justice" - isn't nihilism so much as impatience with lofty standards that arrive too late. In Hellman's world, the moral life starts not with grand ideals but with a blunt boundary. Justice can be a public language; refusal is the private act that makes it real.