Justice & Law Quote by Alfred Day Hershey

Hershey smuggles a scientist's optimism into the cadence of a sermon. The line starts with a generous premise: humans "love truth and justice". Not pursue, not negotiate, not get dragged toward kicking and screaming, but love. It's an almost daring claim for a 20th-century researcher who lived through propaganda wars, McCarthy-era loyalty tests, and the bureaucratic reality that "truth" often arrives as a committee decision with funding attached. That tension is the point: he’s naming an ideal not because it’s reliably true, but because it’s socially useful to say out loud.

The clever move is the pivot to "ceremonies". Truth and justice are abstract; ceremonies are embodied. Awards, commencements, Nobel banquets, courtroom rituals, even the lab meeting with its performative skepticism - these are choreographed moments where a community reassures itself that evidence matters and fairness is possible. Hershey recognizes that values endure less through private conviction than through repeated public enactment. We don't just discover truth; we rehearse it.

Then comes the theological tag: "thank God". From a scientist, it reads less like doctrinal confession than rhetorical humility, a way of acknowledging that our attachment to truth and justice isn't inevitable. It’s contingent, fragile, and maybe miraculous in the small-m sense: a fortunate feature of human social life that makes science, law, and democracy workable at all. The subtext is almost a plea: keep honoring these things, because the honoring is part of what keeps them real.