Justice & Law Quote by Kelly Miller

Progress, Kelly Miller insists, is not a parade route; it is trench warfare. The force of the line comes from its refusal of the comforting graphic we love to draw in hindsight: steady upward improvement. Instead, Miller gives us a “zigzag course,” a phrase that doesn’t just describe history but diagnoses the moral psychology of reform. The struggle isn’t between enlightened moderns and benighted traditionalists. It is, uncomfortably, between “conflicting forces” that coexist in the same institutions, the same movements, the same people.

The sentence works by stacking binaries - right/wrong, truth/error, justice/injustice, cruelty/mercy - until the reader feels the churn of public life. He’s not claiming moral relativism; he’s marking how easily moral clarity gets scrambled in practice. Even “mercy” sits beside “cruelty” as an active competitor, not a guaranteed endpoint. That’s a bracing message for any era tempted by triumphalist narratives, but it lands with particular weight in Miller’s lifetime: Reconstruction’s collapse, Jim Crow’s entrenchment, lynching as spectacle, and the slow, contested emergence of Black civic and intellectual power. A sociologist watching America argue about democracy while rationing it would be allergic to straight lines.

Subtext: if progress is zigzag, then setbacks are not proof that the cause is naïve, and victories are not proof that history is finished. Miller’s realism doubles as a strategy: don’t mistake turbulence for failure; don’t confuse momentum with justice.