Justice & Law Quote by Edward Young

A single killing earns the clean, cold label of “murder,” backed by the gibbet: public terror as policy, the state literally hoisting a warning into view. Edward Young’s sting is how quickly that moral clarity dissolves at scale. Multiply the dead by the thousand and the act doesn’t just get excused; it gets rebranded. “War’s glorious art” is an acid phrase, fusing aesthetic admiration with industrial slaughter. Young isn’t merely condemning violence; he’s dissecting the PR machinery that turns it into virtue.

The intent is satirical but not playful. It’s the courtroom logic of irony: the same “lifted hand” that would be punished when aimed at one body is applauded when it commands an army. “Specious” does heavy work here, meaning shiny, plausible, and fundamentally deceptive. Young implies that what changes isn’t the ethics of killing but the narrative frame around it - law, ceremony, patriotism, and the promise of “immortal fame” laundering blood into legacy.

Context matters. Writing in an era of dynastic wars and expanding empire, Young is close enough to the culture of honor and martial celebration to hear its rhetoric clearly, and skeptical enough to expose its contradictions. He anticipates a modern critique: states don’t only monopolize violence; they monopolize the language that makes violence feel necessary, noble, even beautiful. The quote’s power is its brutal symmetry - murder is murder, until authority and applause rename it.