“When justice has been taken away”

In periods when a human community is too young to have yet had time to create justice, as well as in periods when justice has been taken away, beautiful things (which do not rely on us to create them but come on their own and have never been absent from a human community) hold steadily visible the manifest good of equality and balance.

Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Also from this book
Being wrong about beauty