Life & Wisdom Quote by Nicolas Chamfort

Law can move faster than culture, and Chamfort is betting you know it. "Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate" lands like a small, elegant ambush: two near-synonyms made to expose a gap. Legalize is procedural, a stamp, an edict, a new paragraph in the code. Legitimate is social and moral, the slow-grinding consensus that turns permission into acceptance. Chamfort, a razor-tongued moralist on the eve of modernity, is pointing at the theater of authority: states can declare a practice lawful overnight, then act surprised when people still treat it as shameful, suspect, or corrupt.

The subtext is a warning about power's shortcuts. Governments reach for legality because it's measurable and enforceable; legitimacy is unruly, distributed, and earned. By pairing the two verbs, he also hints at the reverse scandal: plenty of things feel legitimate long before they become legal, which makes the law look less like the guardian of morality than its lagging bureaucrat.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Chamfort wrote in a France where institutions were losing credibility and the rhetoric of "rights" was colliding with ancien regime habits. In that climate, legality could read as mere regime preference, and legitimacy as the public's deeper verdict. The line has survived because it describes an evergreen political headache: you can change rules by decree, but you can't decree trust. When lawmakers mistake permission for approval, they win the vote and lose the country.