Justice & Law Quote by Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

Arroyo’s line is a power move disguised as a wish. By insisting justice should be "taken for granted", she’s not settling for reform as a recurring political project; she’s aiming for something rarer and more dangerous: normalization. The sentence flips the usual moral posture of politics, where leaders promise to fight injustice as if it’s an aberration. Here, injustice is treated as the baseline condition of public life, an invisible infrastructure that citizens have learned to navigate. The ambition is to replace that infrastructure so thoroughly that people stop noticing it.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of a country where inequality, impunity, and patronage don’t just happen; they’re absorbed into expectations. "Taken for granted" is the most cutting phrase in the quote because it describes complicity without using the word. If injustice is already assumed, then outrage becomes optional, and accountability becomes theater. Arroyo is asking for a cultural shift as much as a legal one: a society where fairness is not a special event delivered by heroic leaders, but the default operating system.

Coming from a sitting president, the line also performs legitimacy. It frames state power as the vehicle for everyday justice, positioning her administration as the hinge between an old normal and a new one. That’s rhetorically shrewd, especially in a political environment where leaders are often judged less by ideals than by whether institutions can be trusted at all. The quote’s bite is in its implied timeline: if injustice can become ordinary, so can justice. The question is whether politics can survive that promise without betraying it.