Justice & Law Quote by Elihu Root

The line lands like a legal brief turned moral trap: the most reliable engine of injustice isn’t villainy, but sincerity. Root, a lawyer steeped in institutions, is warning that “honest” is not the same as “right.” In fact, honesty can be the perfect solvent for doubt. If you’re convinced your cause is just, you stop interrogating what your cause is doing to other people.

The key move is “mistakenly believing.” Root isn’t attacking conscience; he’s attacking certainty. Justice here isn’t an objective condition but a story people tell themselves - one that can be misread, weaponized, or simply inherited. The subtext is procedural: good intentions are not a safeguard when the mechanisms of power (courts, diplomacy, legislation, war-making) reward cohesion and punish hesitation. “Led to support” suggests a social choreography, not an individual lapse. Institutions, parties, patriotic narratives, even respectable newspapers can guide upright citizens into defending outcomes they’d reject if described plainly.

Root’s era helps. He lived through American expansion, the rise of the administrative state, and the moral justifications that lubricated empire and intervention. A lawyer’s mind notices how easily “justice” becomes a brief for whatever a nation or movement already wants. The sentence is also a quiet indictment of civic naïveté: decency without skepticism is pliable. Root’s bleak insight is that injustice doesn’t always need lies; it can thrive on people who tell the truth about their motives while being wrong about their cause.