Justice & Law Quote by Leonard Cohen

Cohen slips a switchblade into three pillars of public certainty: law, war, religion. The provocation is the word "secretly". He isn't calling for judges, generals, and priests to announce nihilism like a press release. He's imagining an inner disenchantment kept private, the kind that forces a person to stop leaning on institutional scripts and start paying attention to the human cost in front of them.

"Despair of justice" sounds corrosive until you hear what he’s really attacking: the self-satisfied belief that the system automatically produces moral outcomes. A judge who knows the machine can be cruel may scrutinize evidence harder, language sharper, punishment less lazy. Cohen’s "more acute" is about precision born from doubt, not cynicism for its own sake.

The general line is the most pointed. To "despair of triumph" is to stop worshiping victory as a cleansing myth. Once you no longer believe triumph redeems violence, "killing will be defamed" - not merely regretted, but socially stripped of its glamour. Cohen is prying the medal off the act.

Then he turns the knife toward the clergy. If a priest despairs of faith, compassion becomes "true" because it’s no longer a sales pitch for certainty or salvation. It’s care without leverage.

Context matters: Cohen wrote from a late-20th-century landscape of battered ideals - Vietnam’s shadow, post-Watergate suspicion, the waning authority of churches - and from his own lifelong tango with belief. The quote isn’t anti-morality; it’s anti-comfort. He argues that the most ethical stance inside powerful roles may begin as a quiet, disciplined loss of illusions.