"Justice is horrible"
About this Quote
Justice isn’t being called corrupt here; it’s being called terrifying. Durrenmatt’s “Justice is horrible” lands like a trapdoor because it reverses the comforting civic myth that justice is clean, rational, and morally uplifting. In his world, justice is a machine that keeps running after the humans inside it have stopped being legible.
The intent is provocation with a moral edge: to force readers to admit that legal and ethical “rightness” can demand outcomes that feel grotesque. Durrenmatt, writing in postwar Europe and steeped in the anxieties of modern bureaucracy, understands that justice is rarely a gentle restoration. It’s exposure, punishment, irreversibility. It makes private life public, reduces messy motives to admissible facts, and turns suffering into precedent. Even when the verdict is correct, the process can still be cruel.
The subtext carries his signature irony: people want justice the way they want a story with a satisfying ending. But real justice doesn’t behave like narrative. It’s not catharsis; it’s collision. Durrenmatt’s fiction repeatedly stages situations where moral certainty produces unintended consequences, where the desire to balance the scales tips into obsession, and where institutions meant to arbitrate truth become engines of absurdity. “Horrible” is doing double duty: justice is horrible because it confronts us with what we did, and because it shows how thin our control is once we hand judgment to systems.
It’s a warning disguised as a blunt aphorism: if you romanticize justice, you’ll be unprepared for what it actually costs.
The intent is provocation with a moral edge: to force readers to admit that legal and ethical “rightness” can demand outcomes that feel grotesque. Durrenmatt, writing in postwar Europe and steeped in the anxieties of modern bureaucracy, understands that justice is rarely a gentle restoration. It’s exposure, punishment, irreversibility. It makes private life public, reduces messy motives to admissible facts, and turns suffering into precedent. Even when the verdict is correct, the process can still be cruel.
The subtext carries his signature irony: people want justice the way they want a story with a satisfying ending. But real justice doesn’t behave like narrative. It’s not catharsis; it’s collision. Durrenmatt’s fiction repeatedly stages situations where moral certainty produces unintended consequences, where the desire to balance the scales tips into obsession, and where institutions meant to arbitrate truth become engines of absurdity. “Horrible” is doing double duty: justice is horrible because it confronts us with what we did, and because it shows how thin our control is once we hand judgment to systems.
It’s a warning disguised as a blunt aphorism: if you romanticize justice, you’ll be unprepared for what it actually costs.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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