Justice & Law Quote by Doris Lessing

The line lands with the dry snap of someone who’s watched institutions confuse credentialing with wisdom. Lessing isn’t merely dunking on “fools”; she’s puncturing the fantasy that law is a neat architecture of logic, taught cleanly in lecture halls and applied cleanly in courtrooms. Her real subject is the social ecology around the law: clients who lie, colleagues who grandstand, judges who have bad days, bureaucracies that mistake procedure for justice. “Tolerate” is the key verb. It’s not “defeat” or “educate.” The job, she implies, is less about heroic argument than about managing human noise without losing your mind or your ethics.

The subtext is a critique of professional formation. Universities teach doctrine, casebooks, maybe a little “critical thinking,” but they often underteach the emotional labor of power systems: patience, restraint, the ability to keep functioning when rationality isn’t in the room. Lessing’s phrasing suggests a hidden curriculum, the stuff you only learn when ideals meet calendars, egos, and incentives.

Context matters because Lessing wrote with a lifelong suspicion of authority and a keen eye for how people perform intelligence. Coming from a writer who dissected ideology and groupthink, “fools” isn’t a cheap insult; it’s a category of behavior produced by institutions themselves. The joke stings because it’s also counsel: if you want to practice law, you’ll need a thicker skin than your syllabus provides.