Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Addison

Justice, in Addison's hands, isn't a policy goal or a courtroom procedure; it's architecture. He builds it high, hard, and allegedly untouchable, then dares the world to try. The mountain-brow imagery matters: justice is elevated above the swampy realm of private interest, and that altitude doubles as insulation. Torrents (public frenzy, rumor, upheaval) can rage below; armies (state power, conquest, coercion) can march; neither can reach the citadel. It's an ideal designed to shame both mobs and monarchs.

That absolutism is also the tell. Addison writes in early 18th-century Britain, a culture still processing civil war, regicide, restoration, and the Glorious Revolution - decades when "justice" had been loudly claimed by whoever held the sword. Against that historical whiplash, the metaphor performs reassurance: there exists a moral order sturdier than regime change. He's selling legitimacy for a constitutional age that wants to believe law is not merely politics in robes.

The subtext, though, is aspirational propaganda with a wink of anxiety. If justice were truly unassailable, it wouldn't need such a barricaded metaphor. By invoking both torrent and army, Addison admits the real threats: populist passion and militarized authority. The fortress isn't describing how justice always works; it's prescribing how power should behave, and how citizens should imagine the state - not as a conqueror, but as a guardian of something too sacred to be stormed.