1,511 Justice Quotes

Who made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed.

Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world?

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.

The man who barely abstains from violating either the person, or the estate, or the reputation of his neighbours, has surely very little positive merit. He fulfils, however, all the rules of what is peculiarly called justice, and does every thing which his equals can with propriety force him to do, or which they can punish him for not doing. We may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing.

But now, instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust. 'Might makes right,' and hoary folly totters on in her mad career escorted by armies and navies.

I believe in Providence and I believe Providence to be just. Therefore I believe that Providence always rewards the strong, the industrious, and the upright.

I, for my part, acknowledge another precept which says that man must deal the final blow to those whose downfall is destined by God.

The travesty of slavery wasn't physical abuse. It was the moral abuse of looking at a human being as if they are an animal.

I will stand against those who see terrorism when Americans die, but who see suicide bombers who kill Israelis and believe that that is just part of the negotiating process.

When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. ... there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.

Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.

If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers.

The current motto for all of us can only be this: without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom.

There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.

An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. For force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels. For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to systems such as we see in Italy and Russia to-day.

The tribunal here and your American newspapers talk so much about our sharp Nazi methods, but do you realize that within the past year, since the defeat of Germany, 1 million Germans have been evicted from what was originally German territory and which has now been given to Poland? No League of Nations or other body intervened.

Accordingly, death is a harbor of peace for the just, but is believed a shipwreck for the wicked.

Going to where the silence is. That is the responsibility of a journalist: giving a voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful.

These decrees of yours are no different from spiders' webs. They'll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they'll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth.

The wisdom of man never yet contrived a system of taxation that would operate with perfect equality.

Peace, above all things, is to be desired, but blood must sometimes be spilled to obtain it on equable and lasting terms.

We must never lose sight of the fact that the law has a moral foundation, and we must never fail to ask ourselves not only what the law is, but what the law should be.

Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.

When people are friends, they have no need of justice, but when they are just, they need friendship in addition.

Equality consists in the same treatment of similar persons.

It is in justice that the ordering of society is centered.

The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.

To give a satisfactory decision as to the truth it is necessary to be rather an arbitrator than a party to the dispute.

We must ever bear in mind that the great end in view is righteousness, justice as between man and man, nation and nation, the chance to lead our lives on a somewhat higher level, with a broader spirit of brotherly goodwill one for another. Peace is generally good in itself, but it is never the highest good unless it comes as the handmaid of righteousness; and it becomes a very evil thing if it serves merely as a mask for cowardice and sloth, or as an instrument to further the ends of despotism or anarchy. We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life, but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. No man is worth calling a man who will not fight rather than submit to infamy or see those that are dear to him suffer wrong. No nation deserves to exist if it permits itself to lose the stern and virile virtues; and this without regard to whether the loss is due to the growth of a heartless and all-absorbing commercialism, to prolonged indulgence in luxury and soft, effortless ease, or to the deification of a warped and twisted sentimentality.

Revenge is like the sweetest joy next to getting pussy

We have here the problem of bigness. Its lesson should by now have been burned into our memory by Brandeis. The Curse of Bigness shows how size can become a menace - both industrial and social. It can be an industrial menace because it creates gross inequalities against existing or putative competitors. It can be a social menace - because of its control of prices. Control of prices in the steel industry is powerful leverage on our economy. For the price of steel determines the price of hundreds of other articles. Our price level determines in large measure whether we have prosperity or depression - an economy of abundance or scarcity. Size in steel should therefore be jealously watched. In final analysis, size in steel is the measure of the power of a handful of men over our economy. That power can be utilized with lightning speed. It can be benign or it can be dangerous. The philosophy of the Sherman Act is that it should not exist. For all power tends to develop into a government in itself. Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy. Industrial power should be decentralized. It should be scattered into many hands so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men. The fact that they are not vicious men but respectable and social minded is irrelevant. That is the philosophy and the command of the Sherman Act. It is founded on a theory of hostility to the concentration in private hands of power so great that only a government of the people should have it.

Then the big white whale, Clinton. What about someone who is a war criminal, a taker of bribes from foreign dictatorships, almost certainly a rapist (plausibly accused, anyway, by three believable women, of rape), executed a black man (Ricky Ray Rector) who was so mentally retarded that he was unable to plead or to understand the charges - You're against all that, right? But you're for it when it's someone who you think is a 'New Democrat'.

On the political front, we have always pursued the path of truth and justice in our struggle for the legitimate rights of the Tibetan people. We have never indulged in distortions, exaggerations and criticism of the Chinese people. Neither have we harboured any ill will towards them. Above all, we have always held to our position of truth and justice without siding with any of the international political power blocks.

This is practically the language used to fallen women, and chiefly by their own sex: 'God may forgive you, but we never can!' - a declaration which, however common, in spirit if not in substance, is, when one comes to analyse it, unparalleled in its arrogance of blasphemy. That for a single offence, however grave, a whole life should be blasted, is a doctrine repugnant even to Nature's own dealings in the visible world. ~ Ch. 11

When I see waste here, I feel angry on the inside. I don't approve of myself getting angry. But it's something you can't help after seeing Ethiopia.

On the eventual death of racism: 'What ever truth drops on it eventually grinds to a powder.'

The people, who were trying to make this world worse... are not taking a day off. How can I? Light up the darkness.'

I want to say 'I shot the police' but the government would have made a fuss so I said 'I shot the sheriff' instead... but it's the same idea: justice.

Corruption: 'The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places.'

Judges ought to remember, that their office is jus dicere, and not jus dare; to interpret law, and not to make law, or give law.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk his situation.

If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.

When I came back to my native country, after all the stories about Hitler, I couldn't ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn't live where I wanted. I wasn't invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the President, either.

Liberty! Liberty! In all things let us have justice, and then we shall have enough liberty.

Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs.

The attribute of popular government in a revolution is at one and the same time virtue and terror. Virtue without terror is fatal; terror without virtue is impotent....terror is nothing but justice; prompt, severe, inflexible. It is the emanation of virtue.'

Vending machines are big part of my life, I like when you reach into the vending machine to grab your candy bar and that flap goes up to block you from reaching up, that's a good invention, before that it was hard times for the vending machine owners, 'What candy bar are you getting?', 'That one, and every one on the bottom row!'

Hell no, I aint gonna go. On the war in vietnam I sing this song, I aint got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. Clean out my cell, and take my tail to jail without bail, cause better to be in jail fed, than in vietnam dead.

God will give him blood to drink!

Tous maux sont pareils alors qu'ils sont extremes.

In monarchy the crime of treason may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.

By committing a crime, a man places himself, of his own accord, outside the chain of eternal obligations which bind every human being to every other one. Punishment alone can weld him back again; fully so, if accompanied by consent on his part; otherwise only partially so. Just as the only way of showing respect for somebody suffering from hunger is to give him something to eat, so the only way of showing respect for somebody who has placed himself outside the law is to reinstate him inside the law by subjecting him to the punishment ordained by law. The need for punishment is not satisfied where, as is generally the case, the penal code is merely a method of exercising pressure through fear. [p.103]

Malefactors of great wealth.

Whensoever hostile aggressions...require a resort to war, we must meet our duty and convince the world that we are just friends and brave enemies.

Whatever be their degree of talents, it is no measure of their rights.

Look to my future cause my past, is all behind me/Is it a crime, to fight, for what is mine?/Everybody's dyin tell me what's the use of tryin

Why, when murder now is stalking in your streets, when dens of infamy are so thick within your city that competition has forced down the price of prostitution to the level of the wages of your starving shirt makers; when robbers sit in State and national Senate and House, when the boasted 'bulwark of our liberties,' the elective franchise, has become a U. S. dice-box, wherewith great gamblers play away your liberties; when debauchees of the worst type hold all your public offices and dine off the food of fools who support them, why, then, sits Moses Harman there within his prison cell? If he is so great a criminal, why is he not with the rest of the spawn of crime, dining at Delmonico's or enjoying a trip to Europe? If he is so bad a man, why in the name of wonder did he ever get in the penitentiary? ... He looked, this obscenist looked with clear eyes into this ill-got thing you call morality, sealed with the seal of marriage, and saw in it the consummation of immorality, impurity, and injustice. He beheld every married woman what she is, a bonded slave, who takes her master's name, her master's bread, her master's commands, and serves her master's passion; who passes through the ordeal of pregnancy and the throes of travail at his dictation, not at her desire; who can control no property, not even her own body, without his consent, and from whose straining arms the children she bears may be torn at his pleasure, or willed away while they are yet unborn. It is said the English language has a sweeter word than any other, - home. But Moses Harman looked beneath the word and saw the fact, - a prison more horrible than that where he is sitting now, whose corridors radiate over all the earth, and with so many cells, that none may count them.

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

It cannot be too clearly understood that this is not a free country, and it will be an evil day for the legal profession when it is.

International law is that law which the wicked do not obey and the righteous do not enforce.

I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.

When men take it in their heads to-day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn some one who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is; and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow, may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake. And not only so; the innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty, fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

Then will come a National Socialist State tribunal; then will November, 1918, be expiated; then the heads will roll.

He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations.

'I believe something happened to Tawana Brawley. . . I think it is absurd that someone would say that a 15-year-old girl could have made all that up, including fooling a hospital.'

Hungary conquered and in chains has done more for freedom and justice than any people for twenty years. But for this lesson to get through and convince those in the West who shut their eyes and ears, it was necessary, and it can be no comfort to us, for the people of Hungary to shed so much blood which is already drying in our memories. In Europe's isolation today, we have only one way of being true to Hungary, and that is never to betray, among ourselves and everywhere, what the Hungarian heroes died for, never to condone, among ourselves and everywhere, even indirectly, those who killed them. It would indeed be difficult for us to be worthy of such sacrifices.

A punishment that penalizes without forestalling is indeed called revenge.

Even those who are fed up with morality ought to realize that it is better to suffer certain injustices than to commit them even in wars, and that such deeds do us more harm than a hundred underground forces on the enemy's side.

For capital punishment to be really intimidating, human nature would have to be different; it would have to be as stable and serene as the law itself. But then human nature would be dead.

From my first articles to my latest book I have written so much, and perhaps too much, only because I cannot keep from being drawn toward everyday life, toward those, whoever they may be, who are humiliated and debased. They need to hope, and if all keep silent or if they are given a choice between two kinds of humiliation, they will be forever deprived of hope and we with them.

I loathe none but executioners.

Is it possible eternally to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world? Our answer is yes. This ethic, at once unsubmissive and loyal, is in any event the only one that lights the way to a truly realistic revolution.

The age of enlightenment, as people say, wanted to suppress the death penalty on the pretext that man was naturally good. Of course he is not (he is worse or better). After twenty years of our magnificent history we are well aware of this. But precisely because he is not absolutely good, no one among us can pose as an absolute judge and pronounce the definitive elimination of the worst among the guilty, because no one of us can lay claim to absolute innocence.

The miner who is exploited or shot down, the slaves in the camps, those in the colonies, the legions of persecuted throughout the world - they need all those who can speak to communicate their silence and to keep in touch with them.

The punishment that aims to intimidate an unknown murderer certainly confers a vocation of killer on many another monster about whom there is no doubt.

The unbeliever cannot keep from thinking that men who have set at the center of their faith the staggering victim of a judicial error ought at least to hesitate before committing legal murder.

There are no just people - merely hearts more or less lacking in justice. Living at least allows us to discover this and to add to the sum of our actions a little of the good that will make up in part for the evil we have added to the world. Such a right to live, which allows a chance to make amends, is the natural right of every man, even the worst man... Without that right, moral life is utterly impossible.

To tell the truth, far from being romantic, I believe in the necessity of a rule and an order. I merely say that there can be no question of just any rule whatsoever.

It is the duty of all troops and police in my command to adopt the severest measures. Every act of violence committed by partisans must be punished immediately. Reports submitted must also give details of countermeasures taken. Wherever there is evidence of a considerable number of partisan groups a proportion of the male population of the area will be arrested, and in the event of an act of violence being committed these men will be shot.

But we grow old. Ah! when shall all men's good Be each man's rule, and universal Peace Lie like a shaft of light across the land, And like a lane of beams athwart the sea, Thro' all the circle of the golden year?

I recently discovered that someone has taken out email accounts with addresses containing my name. ...If caught (and of course they won't be) but, if caught I hope the responsible parties will be forced to live on the South Beach diet for an entire month. I know that may seem like cruel and unusual punishment but goshdarnit identity theft is an ugly thing. (Sunday, February 27, 2005)

You are a nest of vipers and thieves, and by the grace of the almighty God, I will root you out!

First silence. Then denial. Then support of the insupportable. Then vilification of the dissenters. The pattern is as old as time.

Torture was necessary to maintain slavery. It was integral to slavery. You cannot have slavery without some torture or the threat of torture; and you cannot have torture without slavery. You cannot imprison a free man for ever unless you have broken him; and you can only forcibly break a man's soul by torturing it out of him. Slavery dehumanizes; torture dehumanizes in exactly the same way. The torture of human beings who have no freedom and no recourse to the courts is slavery.

Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I'm not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - 'enhanced interrogation techniques' - is a term originally coined enhanced interrogation techniques by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.

OH! hear a pensive captive's prayer, For liberty that sighs ; And never let thine heart be shut Against the prisoner's cries.

White-collar crime convictions are deterrents, I've seen a lot of that. Imprisoning heads of state is a deterrent, too. It doesn't happen very often.