Life & Wisdom Quote by John Dryden

Power doesn’t just win the argument; it rewrites the moral ledger. Dryden’s line slices through the pieties of law-and-order by pointing out what societies routinely do in practice: they call an act “crime” only while it’s losing. Once it succeeds, the same behavior gets laundered into legitimacy, policy, even virtue. It’s a brutal inversion of justice: the court verdict arrives after the battlefield.

The intent isn’t to celebrate criminality so much as to expose the opportunism of public morality. Dryden, a Restoration poet who watched regimes topple, rebrand, and demand fresh oaths of loyalty, understood that “justification” is often a retroactive story told by whoever ends up holding the seals and the treasury. The subtext is cynicism sharpened into a rule: legality is less a principled standard than a status conferred by outcome. If you can’t enforce your moral categories, you don’t really have them.

What makes the aphorism work is its compressed audacity. “Alone” does heavy lifting, turning the line into a diagnosis of collective hypocrisy: we pretend that intent, harm, and ethics matter, but the only consistent criterion is success. It echoes the Restoration’s transactional politics, when yesterday’s traitor could become today’s patriot with the right coronation and a convenient amnesty.

Dryden’s sting is contemporary, too: coups become “revolutions,” surveillance becomes “security,” corporate wrongdoing becomes “innovation” if the stock price cooperates. The quote’s real target isn’t criminals; it’s the society eager to be complicit once the gamble pays off.