Justice & Law Quote by Emile M. Cioran

Cioran rigs the sentence like a moral trap: even if you imagine an immaculate state, power still leaves fingerprints. The opening clause, "If, at the limit", is doing the heavy lifting. It gestures toward a thought experiment taken to an extreme, where "crime" is defined narrowly as overt illegality or brutal repression. Fine, Cioran concedes: picture a ruler so disciplined, so procedural, so allergic to scandal that nothing counts as a crime. Then he detonates the consolation prize: governance, by its nature, still manufactures "injustices."

The line works because it separates two ideas modern politics likes to fuse. Crime is legible: a breach you can prosecute, document, condemn. Injustice is slipperier: distributed harm, structural bias, trade-offs that ruin some lives to stabilize others. You can obey the law and still crush people under it. You can keep your hands clean and still preside over dirty outcomes. That contrast is Cioran's cynicism sharpened into a diagnostic tool.

Context matters: Cioran wrote in the long shadow of Europe's ideological catastrophes, after watching grand promises of order curdle into authoritarianism. He distrusted political salvation stories, especially the ones that claim moral exemption through necessity. The subtext is an indictment of every regime that hides behind "administration" and "security" to launder suffering into policy. Ruling without crime is a fantasy of innocence; ruling without injustice would require abandoning rule itself.