Daily Inspiration Quote by Pierre Corneille

A line like this is Corneille at his most chillingly efficient: a moral jailbreak dressed up as loyalty. "In the service of Caesar, everything is legitimate" doesn’t merely praise power; it rebrands power as its own alibi. The key move is the word "legitimate" - not "allowed", not "forgiven", but made lawful by the act of serving. Caesar becomes less a person than a principle: the state, the ruler, the machine that turns private scruples into public necessity.

Corneille wrote in a France where absolutism was consolidating and theater was a public arena for political thought under watchful eyes. His tragedies often stage the collision between honor, duty, and personal conscience, and this sentence crystallizes the argument authoritarians love because it’s rhetorically clean: if the end is "Caesar", the means stop needing names. Violence, betrayal, cruelty - they’re not denied; they’re laundered.

The subtext is a warning hidden in the posture of compliance. Corneille understands how people talk themselves into complicity: you don’t have to be evil, just useful. Service becomes a solvent that dissolves responsibility, letting the speaker borrow grandeur from the empire while dodging the ethical bill.

What makes the line work is its brutal universality. Swap Caesar for nation, party, security, revolution, company - and you get the timeless logic of institutional wrongdoing: if you can claim you were serving something bigger, you can call anything "legitimate."