Justice & Law Quote by Mark Twain

Twain’s jab lands because it pretends to be theology while really staging a courtroom farce. By granting God omnipotence and then carving out one tiny exception - copyright law - he doesn’t just complain about legal complexity. He frames the system as so tangled, so self-contradictory, that even omniscience would throw up its hands. It’s classic Twain: the punchline is an insult delivered with a straight face, making bureaucracy look not merely inefficient but metaphysically absurd.

The specific intent is less “artists deserve less” than “the law as written is a mess.” Twain knew the stakes. Late in his career he became outspoken about authors’ rights, even testifying before Congress. He wanted writers paid, but he also watched how copyright regimes splintered across borders and technologies, how publishers and lawmakers could turn protection into a maze that advantaged intermediaries over creators. The joke’s hidden target isn’t the idea of copyright; it’s the incoherent patchwork of statutes, terms, renewals, and exceptions that turns a moral claim (“pay the author”) into a scavenger hunt.

Subtextually, Twain is mocking modernity’s habit of treating man-made rules as sacred. By invoking God, he highlights how copyright is often defended with piety - “property,” “theft,” “rights” - while functioning in practice like an arbitrary priesthood of paperwork. The line still works because the genre hasn’t changed: each new medium promises democratization, then arrives with an updated layer of legal nonsense. Twain’s joke is a warning: when a law’s logic collapses, only power remains legible.