War & Peace Quote by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Singer’s line refuses the comforting fiction that justice is an idea we can perfect in the abstract. He drags it back to the body: a knife, a gun, the blunt fact of physical asymmetry. Justice, in this framing, isn’t primarily a courtroom ideal or a constitutional promise; it’s a condition that can’t exist while the strong retain the practical option of erasing the weak.

The sentence works because it’s structurally uncompromising. “There will be no justice” isn’t a lament; it’s a veto. Singer ties justice to a single recurring human impulse: the readiness to “stand with” a weapon. That verb matters. Standing implies posture, permission, even pride - violence not as accident but as stance. The subtext is that societies often moralize after the fact, laundering domination through law, war rhetoric, or “order,” while the weaker are asked to treat survival as a personal failing.

Context matters: Singer, a Yiddish novelist shaped by Eastern European Jewish life, exile, and the 20th century’s machinery of mass killing, understood that modernity didn’t civilize cruelty; it industrialized it. The knife suggests intimate brutality; the gun, distance and scale. By pairing them, he collapses domestic violence, street violence, pogroms, and genocide into a single continuum: power seeking the path of least resistance.

The intent isn’t pacifist naivete so much as a grim diagnostic: any justice built on coercive imbalance is provisional. Until the vulnerable stop being easy to destroy, “justice” is just the story the survivors tell.