Justice & Law Quote by Howard Mumford Jones

Jones lands a grimly practical diagnosis: persecution isn’t a tragic glitch in “civilization,” it’s a default setting. The line works because it recasts repression as administrative convenience. “First law” borrows the authority of physics, suggesting inevitability, but the real bite is in the word “easier.” He’s not describing monsters; he’s describing managers of stability. Societies, like institutions, choose the cheaper option: silence the dissenter instead of paying the cognitive and political cost of being wrong.

The subtext is an indictment of how communities protect identity. Criticism doesn’t merely question policies; it threatens the stories a group tells about itself: virtue, unity, legitimacy. Meeting criticism requires argument, evidence, humility, and, worst of all, change. Suppressing it requires only power and a narrative that recodes dissent as danger. Jones captures that psychological bargain in a single asymmetry: debate is labor; repression is efficiency.

Context matters. Jones lived through World War I, the Red Scares, the rise of European fascism, World War II, and the Cold War’s loyalty machinery. In that arc, persecution often arrived wearing respectable clothes: committees, moral panics, “security,” “decency,” “anti-subversion.” His sentence anticipates the modern playbook too, where platform bans, harassment campaigns, and bureaucratic choke points can replace overt censorship while serving the same function: reducing the cost of accountability.

The intent isn’t fatalism so much as a warning label. If persecution is socially “easy,” resisting it has to be deliberately hard-won: building norms and systems that make meeting criticism less expensive than crushing it.