Justice & Law Quote by Brigham Young

There is a velvet-gloved threat in Brigham Young's phrasing: not merely to evade the law, but to rise "perfectly" above it, with the audacity of moral certainty. The word choice matters. "Perfectly" smuggles in a claim of purity that preemptively disqualifies criticism. If the speaker is perfect, the law becomes not a boundary but a tool, a bureaucracy waiting to be repurposed by the righteous.

In a 19th-century American landscape where federal authority was expanding and religious minorities were often treated as suspect, this line reads like a manifesto of sovereignty. Young led a people who had been harassed, displaced, and killed; distrust of outside courts and legislatures wasn't paranoia so much as lived experience. The subtext is protection: if the law can be used against us, we must learn to use it first. Yet the sentence also reveals how quickly a defensive posture can harden into a governing theology.

"Servant" and "master" turns politics into household hierarchy. It's domestic language applied to the state, implying that legitimacy flows from who commands, not from shared consent. Coming from a leader who wielded enormous influence over a semi-isolated community, the line also doubles as internal instruction: loyalty should attach to the leader's moral order, not to distant institutions. It's a recipe for autonomy, and a warning about what autonomy can justify when one man's conscience crowns itself above the rules meant to restrain everyone.