"Justice will overtake fabricators of lies and false witnesses"
About this Quote
The pairing of “fabricators of lies” with “false witnesses” sharpens the target. Heraclitus isn’t only condemning private deception; he’s calling out the civic sabotage of testimony. In Greek city-states, public life ran on speech acts: oaths, accusations, deliberation, reputation. False witness wasn’t gossip; it was infrastructure damage. By naming both the maker and the mouthpiece, Heraclitus sketches a whole supply chain of untruth, from invention to public performance.
The subtext is that reality has allies. Heraclitus’s cosmos is governed by logos, an underlying rational pattern that human beings can ignore but not cancel. Lies are parasitic on that pattern: they borrow the credibility of a shared world while quietly hollowing it out. Justice “overtaking” them implies that consequences are baked into the act itself. The more a community relies on falsified speech, the more it destabilizes the conditions that let anyone be believed. Truth, here, isn’t moralistic; it’s structural.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Heraclitus. (2026, January 17). Justice will overtake fabricators of lies and false witnesses. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/justice-will-overtake-fabricators-of-lies-and-27171/
Chicago Style
Heraclitus. "Justice will overtake fabricators of lies and false witnesses." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/justice-will-overtake-fabricators-of-lies-and-27171/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Justice will overtake fabricators of lies and false witnesses." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/justice-will-overtake-fabricators-of-lies-and-27171/. Accessed 13 Feb. 2026.






