“And that’s the ter­ri­ble myth of orga­nized soci­ety, that every­thing that’s done through the estab­lished sys­tem is legal and that word has a pow­er­ful psy­cho­log­i­cal impact. It makes peo­ple believe that there is an order to life, and an order to a sys­tem, and that a per­son that goes through this order and is con­victed, has got­ten all that is due him. And there­fore soci­ety can turn its con­science off, and look to other things and other times. And that’s the ter­ri­ble thing about these past tri­als, is that they have this aura of legit­i­macy, this aura of legal­ity. I sus­pect that bet­ter men than the world has known and more of them, have gone to their deaths through a legal sys­tem than through all the ille­gal­i­ties in the his­tory of man. Six mil­lion peo­ple in Europe dur­ing the Third Reich? Legal. Sacco Vanzetti? Quite legal. The Hay­mar­ket defen­dants? Legal. The hun­dreds of rape tri­als through­out the South where black men were con­demned to death? All legal. Jesus? Legal. Socrates? Legal. And that is the kalei­do­scopic nature of what we live through here and in other places. Because all tyrants learn that it is far bet­ter to do this thing through some sem­blance of legal­ity than to do it with­out that pretense.”

-William Kun­stler