Daily Inspiration Quote by Harold H. Greene

There’s a judge’s warning embedded in this line, and it isn’t aimed at “the poor” so much as at the comfortable classes who prefer sermons to solutions. Greene’s phrasing cuts against a perennial civic reflex: when disorder erupts, elites reach first for moral instruction. Don’t riot. Don’t “go to extremes.” Behave. The sentence dismantles that posture by treating it as naïve at best, cynical at worst. If lawful channels are blocked, delayed, too expensive, or structurally indifferent, then lecturing becomes a kind of bad-faith performance - a way to demand compliance without offering citizenship.

The key move is his pivot from virtue to infrastructure. “You have to make” shifts responsibility away from individual temperament and toward institutional design. “Means of legal redress” is deliberately procedural, almost bloodless, which is precisely the point: he’s arguing that stability isn’t maintained by scolding but by access - to courts, counsel, hearings that aren’t foregone conclusions, administrative processes that don’t grind people down until rage feels like the only remaining leverage.

As a judge, Greene is also defending the legitimacy of law by acknowledging its fragility. The subtext is blunt: riots are not primarily a failure of character; they’re a symptom of a system that has made legality a luxury good. Read in the late 20th-century American backdrop of urban unrest and civil-rights litigation, the line works as both admonition and blueprint: order is earned by justice you can actually reach, not merely justice you can be told exists.