Justice & Law Quote by Harold Pinter

Coming from Harold Pinter, that tidy little sentence lands like a threat delivered in a whisper. “Very much to be desired” sounds like the language of committee minutes, not moral urgency, and that’s the point: Pinter weaponizes politeness. He frames accountability as mere good sense, a civilized preference, while smuggling in an accusation that the world’s most powerful actors are the ones most invested in keeping law abstract and optional.

The intent isn’t just pro-institutional. It’s dramaturgical. Pinter spent a career exposing how domination hides behind everyday speech - evasions, qualifications, the calm voice that controls the room. Here, he adopts the tone of respectable moderation to corner the listener. If an international criminal court is simply “desired,” who exactly is resisting it, and why? The subtext turns the audience into jurors: you’re invited to notice the gap between what democracies claim to be (rule of law) and what they tolerate (impunity for allies, selective outrage, wars reframed as “interventions”).

Context matters because Pinter’s late-life public persona was inseparable from his political fury, especially toward US and UK foreign policy. In the post-Cold War, post-Balkans, pre/post-Iraq era, “international justice” became a battleground between universal principles and sovereignty-as-shield. Pinter’s line keeps the register cool so the stakes feel hotter: if the court is “to be desired,” then the absence of it isn’t unfortunate; it’s engineered. His real target is the comfort of spectatorship - the idea that atrocity is a tragedy, not a crime with a chain of command.