Justice & Law Quote by Philip Pullman

Pullman’s line is a manifesto disguised as a bedtime story. He sets up a blunt contrast - “lists,” “tables,” the bureaucratic furniture of morality - then sweeps it aside for an older technology: narrative. The point isn’t that rules are bad; it’s that rules are shallow. “Thou shalt not” is obedience language, memorable only while authority is standing over you. “Once upon a time” is sticky because it recruits your imagination, your fear, your empathy. It teaches ethics sideways, by making you inhabit consequences rather than recite them.

The subtext is a quiet argument with institutional religion and any culture that treats moral education like compliance training. Pullman, famously skeptical of dogma, frames silence and time as prerequisites for real interior life. Books aren’t just entertainment here; they’re moral laboratories. You don’t get a checklist of virtues, you get characters who fail, rationalize, repent, double down. That ambiguity is the feature: it forces the reader to practice judgment, not submission.

Context matters, too. Pullman writes in a Britain steeped in both Christian heritage and modern secular schooling, where “values” often arrive as laminated posters. He’s insisting that imagination is not a luxury but a civic necessity, because stories are how societies smuggle in their deepest arguments about power, freedom, cruelty, and care. The kicker is the cadence: the faux-biblical “Thou shalt not” meets the nursery incantation “Once upon a time.” One fades with the enforcer; the other outlives the room.