Life & Wisdom Quote by Aesop

Aesop lands a knife with the calm economy of a fable: the same society that treats survival crimes as capital offenses routinely elevates grand larceny into leadership. The line works because it refuses the comforting myth that justice is blind. It suggests justice has excellent eyesight and a strong preference for looking up.

The intent is less to mourn petty thieves than to indict the public’s moral bookkeeping. Hanging implies spectacle and finality; it’s punishment designed not just to deter but to reassure onlookers that order still holds. “Appoint” is the poison word here: the great thieves don’t merely escape consequence, they receive legitimacy. Theft scales into policy, patronage, and “respectability.” Aesop’s cynicism isn’t abstract; it’s procedural. The system doesn’t malfunction. It functions.

The subtext is about power’s alchemy. Small-time theft is visible, individual, and legible to a court. Large-scale theft is diffuse: it hides behind complex transactions, imperial projects, tax regimes, and the ceremonial language of governance. When wrongdoing can be reframed as competence or strength, the public begins to confuse advantage with virtue. The quote also exposes complicity. “We” aren’t innocent observers; we’re the ones maintaining the gallows and filling the ballot box.

Context matters: Aesop wrote in a world where law, status, and punishment were deeply stratified, and where elites could turn coercion into custom. That ancient dynamic still reads modern because it names a durable pattern: societies often punish crimes of desperation while rewarding crimes of influence.