John Leonard Quotes on Justice
-
Where did all the liberals go? If the gringos in their villas dream at all, it's of sugar-plum stock options. Never mind social justice, what happened to habeas corpus? Faith-based globocops police the words in our mouths and the behaviors in our bed while sorehead cable blabbercasters rant them on. Blood lust, wet dreams, collateral damage and extraordinary rendition; Halliburton and Abu Ghraib; an erotics of property, a theology of greed and a holy war on the poor, the old, the sick, the odd and the other - when oh when will the Tatzelwurm turn?
-
Prisons are a growth industry in a country that has stopped building schools because we would rather not pay our property taxes. And we seem remarkably comfortable with a criminal-justice system that locks up and 'disappears' people we fear or hold in contempt - with prisons as closets to hide our unmentionables and as factories for processing spare human parts until there is nothing left but waste.
-
When the state murders, it assumes an authority I refuse to concede: the authority of perfect knowledge in final things.