Justice & Law Quote by Eyvind Johnson

Johnson’s line is a small manifesto dressed up as plain speech: not a promise that justice will arrive, but a demand that we consent to the idea that it can. The opening, “And this we should believe,” has the texture of a moral correction. It’s less inspirational than disciplinary, pushing back against the seductive posture of resignation. Belief here isn’t private comfort; it’s civic equipment.

The pairing of “hope and volition” does the real work. Hope alone is cheap, easily mistaken for virtue. Volition alone can curdle into brute force or ideology. Johnson stitches them together to argue that a just society needs both the emotional fuel to endure disappointment and the deliberate will to build institutions, take risks, and accept conflict. It’s a writer’s version of political realism: the world won’t bend because we want it to, but wanting it without acting is its own form of complicity.

Then he tilts the horizon: “ultimate goal” sounds almost utopian, yet the final clause is aggressively concrete. “Justice for all, injustice for no-one” doesn’t merely advocate fairness; it refuses the common bargain that someone must be sacrificed for order, growth, or national glory. The wording implies a critique of systems that distribute “necessary” harm to the same people again and again, then call it pragmatism.

Context matters: a Swedish modernist who lived through fascism, war, and the ethical compromises of the 20th century would be allergic to grand certainty. The sentence isn’t naive; it’s a rally against learned helplessness, insisting that the path to justice begins with choosing, stubbornly, to believe it remains possible.