Justice & Law Quote by Sean O'Casey

O'Casey, the great dramaturge of Irish disillusionment, flips the usual moral math: wealth is not the cure for hardship but its own kind of sabotage. The line’s engine is the phrase "takes away chances" - a blunt, almost economic description of what we tend to romanticize as comfort. Poverty blocks you with walls; wealth blocks you with padding. It dulls risk, mutes hunger, and replaces ambition with self-protection disguised as "security."

The subtext sharpens in the second sentence, where he sketches a social vacuum around the rich. "There is none to tell the rich to go on striving" isn’t sympathy so much as indictment: money insulates people from the friction that produces growth, critique, and accountability. O'Casey knows how power works onstage and off - characters surrounded by dependents and flatterers start confusing their preferences with reality.

Then comes the biting paradox: "a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life". The alliteration is doing moral double-duty. To "hallow" is to sanctify, to wrap your choices in legitimacy; to "hollow" is to empty them of meaning. Wealth lets you author your own permission structure - you can call your appetites "rights", your comforts "deserved", your avoidance "prudence". The tragedy, O'Casey implies, is self-inflicted: when you can purchase exemption from consequence, you also purchase exemption from purpose.

In O'Casey's Ireland - marked by class struggle, nationalism’s promises, and the theater of public virtue - this is a warning about private sovereignty: when a person becomes their own law, they rarely become their own conscience.