The justice which began with the maxim, 'Everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off,' ends with connivance at the escape of those who cannot pay to escape—it ends, like every good thing on earth, by destroying itself.
 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). copy citation

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Author Friedrich Nietzsche
Source On the Genealogy of Morality
Topic justice laxity severity
Date 1887
Language English
Reference
Note Translated by Horace B. Samuel
Weblink https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Genealogy_of_Morals

Context

“It is possible to conceive of a society blessed with so great a consciousness of its own power as to indulge in the most aristocratic luxury of letting its wrong-doers go scot-free.—"What do my parasites matter to me?" might society say. "Let them live and flourish! I am strong enough for it." —The justice which began with the maxim, "Everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off," ends with connivance at the escape of those who cannot pay to escape—it ends, like every good thing on earth, by destroying itself.— The self-destruction of Justice! we know the pretty name it calls itself—Grace! it remains, as is obvious, the privilege of the strongest, better still, their super-law.
11.
A deprecatory word here against the attempts, that have lately been made, to find the origin of justice on quite another basis—namely, on that of resentment.” source

Meaning and analysis

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